


things of dry hours

by jinlinli, Riakomai



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Art History, Canon Compliant, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Mid-Credits Scene, Character Study, M/M, Painting, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Slow Burn, Stucky Big Bang 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-17 14:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11853768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlinli/pseuds/jinlinli, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riakomai/pseuds/Riakomai
Summary: Bucky’s clothes rustle when he pulls a pocket knife from his jacket. He eyes the scratchings in the trees before carefully carving his name next to a crude stick figure with a gun.“You remember what it was like,” Bucky says, knife still in hand. “Don’t you?”Steve thinks of the flat surface of an ocean, the dreams of floating. A lukewarm sea lapping against his knees as he drifted alone. Water dripping off his chin. His eyes opened in a strange bed and a strange world. “Just a little, yeah.”Bucky nods. “I don’t feel cold anymore.”“I—me too.”In the year after they leave the bunker in Siberia, Steve and Bucky find solace in painting, and maybe in the process, relearn how to be around each other again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fic that I have loved writing, and it is now finally stepping into the world. It was an opportunity to nerd out about painting and art history, and perhaps share that love with the rest of this fandom <3 I hope you guys enjoy!
> 
> Of course, this fic would not have reached this point if not for the amazing betaing by [Rachel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrowningByDegrees/pseuds/DrowningByDegrees)! You have been so very patient with me and my prolonged rambling. You never fail to bring that extra flash of insight that finally pushes me out of my rut. And though this bang has been such a ride, the folks of the OG chat has been with me throughout all the lows and highs. You are the best thing in fandom to have happened to me.
> 
> I must thank my absolutely wonderful artist, [Riakomai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riakomai/pseuds/Riakomai)! You have been such a joy to work with, and I am truly grateful to have known you. You are a lovely soul, and I wish all the best to you <3

It storms once.

This isn’t the season for it, but Bucky shifts in his seat and mutters about rain, and soon, Steve can feel it too. The humidity it brings, the musky scent, the electricity. Bucky doesn’t rub his shoulder, but Steve thinks it must hurt. The timbers murmur as the house shifts and settles around them—the way all old wood-frames do.

The storm rolls in slowly. He can see it coming from miles away. This enormous pile of dark clouds broiling on the horizon, creeping ever closer. Steve says, “Better stay inside tomorrow,” and Bucky nods. He doesn’t whine about it, doesn’t complain or say, _Jeez, Steve, you’re not my ma._ He just kind of scuffles over to the window and peers out at the black mass on the horizon. 

There had been a bad rainstorm when they were kids. It had sluiced down for days, and Steve remembers peeking through the misty glass of his window at the mass of water writhing against the buildings. It was a monstrous thing, and he’d thought that it would pick up the tenements and sweep them all into the sea.

During those storms, his ma always sent him downstairs to help Mr. Harrison on the first floor. He was an old man, missing his left leg below the knee and three of his fingers. The former had been from the Great War, and the latter had been a couple of desperate kids convinced his knucklebones were magic. When the seasonal storms settled over the city, Mr. Harrison always ached too much to move. It was all the damp settling into his bones. Sometimes it would be the winter air that did it, but Bucky is used to the cold.

It hits at night. The lights flicker, and the whole house groans. A stream of water starts to trickle down, right next to the couch, and Steve thinks, _Ah shit, I forgot the roof._

He pulls out a ceramic gravy boat shaped like a duck. It was in the back of one of the cupboards, grey with dust. When he found it cleaning up earlier, he’d waved it at Natasha, asked her, “Who lived here before?” and never got an answer. But that’s just how she is. It’s so kitschy that he’s never found an occasion to use it. Steve places the duck under the leak. There.

Bucky comes into the living room a little while after, and the rain must be bothering him. It has to be, but he still doesn’t mention it. Steve almost wishes he would. He looks up from his book about the Third Reich—he hadn’t thought that people from the future would be just as obsessed with the War as people from the past. He supposes he was wrong about a lot of things.

The duck is overflowing by now, water streaming over its wings and its perky little tail, and what kind of idiot uses a gravy boat to catch rainwater? Bucky walks over to the duck and looks at it. Steve looks at Bucky, waiting for anything—a flash of white teeth, a punch in the shoulder, an _I thought you fixed this whole house up. Hey genius, whatcha got to say for yourself?_ He can hear the violence all around the house—the wind, the rain, thunder in the distance like mortar fire. Underneath it all, the plink-plink of water dripping into the gravy boat. And still, Bucky remains stubbornly, terrifyingly, maddeningly silent. 

He bends down and picks the gravy boat up. He’s very careful about it, hooking two fingers into the handle, cupping the rest of his hand under the bottom, cradling the duck against his chest. Water slops all over his shirt. Everything about him now is just that, Steve thinks. Scrupulous. Bucky walks into the kitchen and pours the rainwater into the sink.

Steve looks at the place where the duck used to sit. There’s a dark rim where the water dampened the floorboards. Bucky puts the empty gravy boat back under the leak, and the drops make an almost musical sound when they splash in. He stays where he is for a while, half-kneeling on the ground, watching the happy little ceramic duck and the rainwater. 

It’s such an odd moment to be fixated on, Steve thinks.

* * *

 

Steve has always been a city boy, but he finds himself inexplicably liking this house in the middle of nowhere. It’s old but solid. A steep roof with gables, white-framed windows, a shingled facade, a wide porch. Painted all in white and blue. There are light gauzy curtains over the windows and bright ceramic mugs with chipped enamel on the coffee table.

When Natasha brought him here, he’d stood on the porch and squinted across the wide flat plains surrounding them, and said, “You’ve picked a lonely place to lay low.”

“It was built during your time,” Natasha had replied with a half-smile. Barely a joke, but he laughed anyway. They were both a little worn thin, he’d thought.

He’d replaced the pipes and the rotting wood supports. He stripped away the fading wallpaper and painted everything in shades of red and brown and beige. Warm colors. The windows were nailed shut, he remembers. They still are. Every time, Steve goes to pry out the nails, Natasha always stops him, and eventually, he learns. Don’t touch the windows. Got it. 

The carpet’s newer than the rest of the house, but even that was grey and moldering. He ripped it out, and underneath was the original hardwood flooring. Beautiful and oak. He sanded and stained and buffed the original hardwood flooring until it shone. By the time he was done, he felt better than he had in a long time. 

There’s something restorative about rebuilding an old house.

He stands in the doorway and looks at the tree next to the porch—stocky with a thick trunk, thick branches, thick waxy leaves, thick roots that churn under pavement, splitting asphalt open. But there aren’t any sidewalks or roads to break apart here. Just a little dirt path that leads off to nowhere.

He’s never lived somewhere like this before, and it occurs to him that it’s just as well that this place is so distinctly itself—so markedly detached from anything resembling home. Even the dust settles differently. It does more than all his time living in DC or Brooklyn ever had. It makes swallowing the time shift suddenly bearable.

Natasha brings a length of fabric with her the next time she visits and says it’s to cover Bucky’s arm—what’s left of it. Steve opens his mouth to argue. It’s not something he should _hide_. Steve has always wished that he’d woken up while they were thawing him out. He’d rather deal with the reality, however harsh, then cover it up and pretend that it’s not happening. Bucky was always the same way. 

But Natasha gives him this look, and he remembers that Bucky always sits on his right side. He never comments on how the humidity makes his shoulder throb even though Steve knows it must. Always angled almost perpendicular to him. Always so careful. And in a lot of ways, Natasha knows Bucky better than Steve does. 

So Steve doesn’t say anything. He pulls out the little sewing kit tucked in the top shelf of the linen closet. He measures the mass of exposed wiring and warped metal, cuts and sews the fabric into a sort of cap for Bucky’s arm. It’s a stiff black fabric, unadorned. He waits for Bucky to grumble that it’s too plain. Maybe a splash of color or a shiny metal bit, wouldn’t that be nice, Stevie? Give the fabric some _character_ for Christ’s sake. 

Bucky just leans against the window frame and doesn’t even ask why they’re nailed shut. It’s like that part of him has smoothed over entirely. He doesn’t poke and prod at things he shouldn’t, doesn’t question, doesn’t challenge. He listens silently as Steve sews a plain black arm covering and talks to Natasha about the kitchen fixtures, the spotty electricity, the damp heat of summer. 

Steve finishes, and Natasha carefully fits it over Bucky’s arm. There’s a little bit of velcro on the inside, so Bucky can take it on and off himself. The windows are nailed shut, casting long yellow strips of light everywhere, and Bucky never asks why.

 

* * *

 

 “Let’s go for a walk,” Bucky says after a while.

“Alright.”

Bucky’s gait is somewhat rolling and uneven with his weight shifted just a little to the right. When Natasha’s around, he straightens up a little, and his walk is steady. When he’s alone or lost in his own head, he limps. It’s been months, and yet Bucky still sometimes walks like he’s used to compensating for more weight on his left side. He still walks like he has an arm. 

When they walked out of that Siberian bunker, there was nothing for miles around. Nothing but their breathing and their boots crunching in the snow as they shuffled forward. He’d imagined then that he and Bucky were the only two people in existence.

There’s a stream a half hour’s walk away. The banks are wide and hemmed in by tall grass that come up to his chest. There’re words and pictures carved into the tree trunks. The kids from a nearby town used to play here during school breaks. 

This is a secret place, Steve thinks. A sanctuary known only to children. 

Bucky sits in the shade of a large tree, dipping his feet in the sluggish water. He’s humming. It’s a loose melody with a hint of swing to it, but even that is oddly flattened. Like his heart isn’t really in it anymore. When it eventually tapers off, Steve sits next to him. He hadn’t realized how much the quiet weighs on him, weighs on them both. Even his pulse seems muted. 

Everything was loud in Brooklyn. There was always the just-audible scuff of shoes, the barely intelligible murmur of the neighbor’s radio, their conversations, the shouts and laughs from the streets. If nothing else, there was the grumbling coal stove. If not even that, they could listen to their heartbeats booming in their ears. They never truly learned what it was like to exist somewhere quiet.

Out here, the most he can get is the leaves rustling against each other. And there are many times when even the trees are silent. 

He shuffles a little closer to Bucky, just to have something to listen to. Bucky has a watch, he realizes. Everything is quiet enough for him to hear it clicking from his pocket. It’s comforting.

Bucky’s clothes rustle when he pulls a pocket knife from his jacket. He eyes the scratchings in the trees before carefully carving his name next to a crude stick figure with a gun. 

“You remember what it was like,” Bucky says, knife still in hand. “Don’t you?”

Steve thinks of the flat surface of an ocean, the dreams of floating. A lukewarm sea lapping against his knees as he drifted alone. Water dripping off his chin. His eyes opened in a strange bed and a strange world. “Just a little, yeah.”

Bucky nods. “I don’t feel cold anymore.”

“I—me too.”

 

* * *

 

 They have a routine now. 

Steve is always awake before Bucky, so he scrounges up breakfast for himself before finding something to do. He reads the news or finds any of the firearms that Bucky and Natasha keep squirreled away. Eventually Bucky will get up too, and he’ll slide into the kitchen. Steve won’t even realize he’s awake until he hears the muffled hiss of hot oil. 

He’ll spend the rest of the day reading, and Steve will go for a run. In the evening, they’ll talk or watch a movie. Sometimes Natasha will come over with news. Bucky will go to sleep, and Steve will remain awake for a while longer. Then the day cycles back around, and they do everything all over again.

They’re not living together; he can’t call it that. It’s more like existing adjacently with a sheen of domesticity on top. But it’s comfortable. They’ve settled into everything so well that Steve can’t help but find himself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And well, it doesn’t ever drop.

He has never been idle this long, and the hours stretch endlessly ahead of him. The soldier in him never quite sleeps. He finds himself peering out the windows for the gleam of a metal buckle, an odd shadow, a bird taking flight from long grass, the slender barrel of a sniper rifle. He trusts Natasha to hide them well, but still he watches and waits for an enemy that will never come.

One day, Bucky’s shoving a bit of bread around his plate, and Steve’s leaning against the counter watching him. The bread’s gone sticky from humidity, but Bucky keeps pushing it around like he’s making up his mind about it. Steve just watches him, and he feels the pressure building up inside his head. He feels stupid with it. All this pent-up something pressing against his skull.

“Let’s watch a movie,” Steve says. “You pick.”

Bucky looks at him and says, “Alright.”

He picks one that’s about a surfer who gets her left arm bitten off by a shark. Steve feels faintly nauseous by the end.

“I like it,” Bucky says. “It’s kind of a funny movie.”

“I couldn’t help but notice some parallels.” Steve privately wishes that it wouldn’t spend so much time talking about how inspirational and brave the girl is.

“It’s not healthy to project your experiences onto fiction,” Natasha says, and Steve doesn’t even know when she showed up. Maybe halfway through or at the beginning when the girl was getting her arm bitten off.

Bucky rolls his shoulders a bit and asks, “What happened to the shark?”

“A fisherman killed it,” says Natasha. 

Steve stands. “I think I’ll go to bed.” 

Through the open bedroom door, he can hear Bucky ask Natasha how the girl feels about sharks. The shark that bit off her arm is dead, but there are other sharks. Does she even like sharks? Is she still afraid of them? Does she secretly want to hunt them to extinction?

“Now look who’s projecting.” He can hear the smile in Natasha’s voice.

 

* * *

 

 The thing is, Steve muses, Peggy didn’t change. Not like Bucky did. She kept her wit and her sharp humor, even if it was somewhat tempered by age. He could talk to her and know that she still was the same person. He thinks of Peggy and her sly smiles, like they were both sharing a private joke. And well, no one else would understand it, even if they tried to explain the punch line. “It’s all so strange,” she’d said to him once, laughing. “Isn’t it?” God, he misses her. 

It’d been bad towards the end. He’d visited as often as he could. She would smile at him just like she always did and say, “My, my, you look just like a man I knew as a young woman.”

He swallowed. “Who was he?”

“That’s a secret,” she said mischievously and then, “Oh, don’t make that face. The comparison is quite flattering. He was very handsome, you see.”

“What happened to him?”

“Hmm?”

“The man you knew.” He had to stop and catch his breath before going on. “The one who looked like me.”

Her smile softened then, and she patted the back of his hand. “A war happened, my dear.” 

He remembers what Sharon’d looked like in front of the trunk of her car. Her leg pushed against the rear bumper, her chin tipped up just so. There was something of Peggy in her, he thought. Now that he was looking, it felt obvious. A hint of steel in her voice, her deliberate, methodical way of moving.

Sharon smiled at him after he kissed her. A kiss before heading off to war. It was traditional. A centuries-old practice. He hasn’t seen her since, and he wonders if that, too, is traditional. 

It’s not enough. In hindsight, he thinks, kissing Sharon is a lot like kissing Natasha. Because of course everything had to change. Even kissing is different in this brave new century. 

He walks outside, and Bucky’s sitting on the porch. Waiting for him maybe. His shirt sleeve is rolled back to expose the black cap hiding the twisted lump where his arm should be. Steve feels just a little sick at the sight, but it doesn’t seem to bother Bucky at all. 

“You know, with Peggy—” Steve says because it’s suddenly so important to him that he clears the air right here, right now. “I only kissed her once.”

Bucky nods. “Yeah, I saw the lipstick on your—”

“No.” He clears his throat. “That was with someone else.” Lieutenant Lorraine. “I kissed Peggy after you—fell. It was right before I crashed the plane.”

“Okay,” Bucky says.

And this, _this_ is what’s been bothering Steve this whole damn time. This muted nonreaction. It’s not that Bucky’s quieter now and maybe a little prone to startling. It’s this distinct sense that Steve gets ever since Bucky came back that he’s somehow a fundamentally different person. Or maybe just part of a person.

He has all the bits and pieces of memory of Bucky Barnes, but Steve talks to him, and he feels like he’s talking to half of Bucky. It’s like there’s this blank space where the rest of him _should_ be, but there’s nothing. It’s terrifying.

 

* * *

 

 Natasha looks at Bucky who’s lying on the porch with his hair tied up and ice sliding down his neck. The three of them and the heat and the old house with its shuttered windows. There’s a strange sort of peace in the air. She offers Steve a ripe peach and sends him a level look before saying, “You don’t want Barnes here. Why?”

He can’t explain it. Not even to himself and certainly not to her. All he can do is gesture expansively and hope it encompasses whatever this is adequately. It doesn’t. Natasha raises an eyebrow. Any levity has long since evaporated.

Steve settles on, “We’re both different people now,” and Natasha lets a sigh gust out as she pinches the bridge of her nose and mutters something unflattering in Russian.

“I’m not going to console you, Rogers. Frankly, Barnes is a long way from anything remotely resembling normal right now, and you’re the only thing he’s got left.”

“I know,” Steve says, and there must be something in his voice that makes Natasha take pity on him. She leans back and takes a bite, and for a while, they occupy themselves with eating peaches. 

Natasha tilts her head and says, quietly, “You started all of this for him. I don’t understand why you’d change your mind now.”

“I’m not going to just—I don’t know—leave. God, I would never do that to him,” Steve says. “You know that.”

“I do.” She smiles and bites into another peach, chewing slowly.

It’s late enough in the season for them to be sweet and soft with only a hint of tartness. The peaches are less like fruit and more like candy—swollen, saccharine, oversaturated. Steve spits a pit into the palm of his hand. 

"Are you still keeping track of Sam?" he asks suddenly.

"Steve—"

" _Natasha_."

She sighs. "You really pick the worst times. I know where he probably is. I can't say for sure. It's not my place to pry, but I think he went home. Watching Rhodey fall out of the sky dug up a lot of old ugly memories. "

"He's with his family," Steve says and releases a shuddering breath. "That's—good. It helps a lot."

"I'm not giving you an address. He doesn't need any more of our mess showing up on his doorstep. 

"I know," Steve says. "I'm not going to—he didn't need to get involved. He was never the problem the Accords were trying to fix. Sam doesn't _do_ collateral damage. It's not how he was trained, it's not how he fought his wars, and it's not why he got those wings. He's _pararescue_. He more than anyone else remembers who's standing on the streets when the buildings start to topple. But he took the Accords personally. Them telling him that he doesn't care enough about noncombatant lives when his entire tour in Afghanistan, he was desperately trying to work around a command that didn't give a single damn about minimizing civilian casualties. It's only when the names and faces started looking uncomfortably American that they started to care."

"Steve," Natasha says. "He'll be fine. He's dug himself out of this hole before, and he can do it again. He just needs some time to himself."

"I know."

 

* * *

 

 Sometimes Steve finds him standing in the eaves of the house with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. And he’d be weeping. And Steve always leaves him to it, creeping away. Later, Bucky will come inside, and he’ll say, “I miss Carter’s tea. I hate tea, but hers was alright,” or “The sunset’s real nice tonight,” or “It’s weird. The sky is never dark anymore. Like night just stopped existing sometime in the last seventy years.”

 

* * *

 

 Bucky gets eight hours of sleep every night. Steve knows he shouldn’t begrudge him for it, but he does anyway. Because here’s the thing. Steve’s calming down, settling in. He’s gotten used to the slightly off quality to Bucky, like he’s looking at him through warped glass. He’s making peace with the half-emotions, but as Steve gets better, Bucky worsens. At first, it was contained, but it’s starting to leak out. The edges are beginning to fray. 

Sometimes they’re talking or they’re passing each other in the kitchen, and Steve happens to touch Bucky. His hand slides over his neck, his chest, his wrist—finds a pulse point. He can feel then the panicked thrumming of Bucky’s heart, even when the rest of him seems calm. 

And Steve’s so careful not to push. He can feel that crazed tempo in his wrist, but Bucky never pushes him away. He never says no, so Steve makes sure that he doesn’t ever cross a line. He keeps his touches in his hair, his arms, his back, his face. Steve never covers his eyes. 

Maybe he shouldn’t be touching Bucky at all, but there’s a keen horror in that prospect. Since the war, a shoulder clap was the first physical contact he’d had with Bucky that had been just that—simple touch, without pain or violence. Before, touch had been communication. Thoughts and emotions conveyed through gentle punches, rough hugs, and light shoves. And well, neither of them had ever really been good at talking, but they never needed to be. Even now, Steve can’t help but stand still sometimes and soak in the uncomplicated pleasure of being able to touch Bucky again. Losing that—he is not a strong enough man to consider it.

He wishes that Bucky didn’t sleep so well because then, maybe he could broach the topic. It seems absurd to ask someone who’s sleeping better than himself if they’re okay. 

It’s in the early hours of the morning, alone and with too much time to think that Steve realizes that Natasha had meant Bucky to be Steve’s new project. A task to occupy his time and energy. He’d be angry at her, but it’s such a characteristic move on her part. That relentless pragmatism is nothing if not admirable. He sighs.

He knows that he’s not much of a man without a task. Win a war, retrieve the stone, pay the rent, stop that man, find Bucky, bring Bucky home, make Bucky happy again. He hasn’t stopped once since he left Brooklyn. This body of his is constantly raring to run, to fight, to move until his mind’s at the point of collapse. 

He was on a mission with Natasha once where they were so deep into hostile territory that they had no time to sleep. They were stuck there for almost a fortnight. After, Natasha had reported back to Fury, and Steve realized that he didn’t remember doing half of the things she said he did. As if his mind had shut down out of sheer exhaustion, but his body continued on without him.

He hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of the serum—not really. He was just an idiot kid, desperate to prove himself. And after the war was over, he would go home to his tenement in Brooklyn, and everything would be normal again. It’s still there in his memory. The crumbling facade, the puddles of dirty water, the lines of drying laundry, the chair with a missing leg that they’d propped up against a stack of books, the wallpaper peeling off at the corners, Bucky with neat hair and a cocky smile. 

Brooklyn was a stinking, miserable place, and he doesn’t miss it at all. But it was normal and familiar. God help him, it was his home. He knows that it doesn’t exist anymore, but he can’t shake the image even after visiting the new, modern Brooklyn. He’d walked past the faux-vintage boutiques, the distressed-wood storefronts, the quaint cafes, and it hadn’t registered as a real place to him. This strange parody of poverty. Wealthy people taking on all the affectations and trappings of it with all the ugly parts carefully snipped away. There’s this strange idea nowadays that being poor is romantic somehow. Bu there’s nothing noble about being hungry.

To the part of him that still thinks he’s five-foot-six and a hundred pounds, Brooklyn is still out there. It’s just hidden somehow. But that way lies madness, he knows. He can’t ever truly settle down if he’s always searching for a place that has long since ceased to be. He can’t make peace. 

Bucky isn’t waiting for him in their shitty apartment. Bucky’s here. He has tangled hair, a lifetime’s worth of old wounds, and a lump of metal where his left arm used to be, but he’s here. They’re together in this tiny house in the middle of nowhere, learning to be around each other again as nameless government organizations search for them, but they’re here. It’s enough.

 

* * *

 

 It’s staggering how much he misses her sometimes. He sees bits of her everywhere—in the crisp smell of clean linen, in the color red, in the gleam of challenge in a stranger’s eye, in a salute, a hand on a hip, a wrinkled tie, a kiss. Hell, even Bucky has a tube of Peggy’s lipstick. Steve has no idea how on earth he got it, and all he can think is that he must have _met_ her somehow. That souls lost in time always find each other eventually. 

He catches sight of it one day on his bookshelf next to a well-thumbed copy of _A Moveable Feast_. Bucky picks it up and looks him in the eye. “You used to like this color, right?” 

“I used to.” He still does. It’s the most important color, he thinks sometimes. As if some colors can be more significant than others. Which is just—absurd. But he thinks this anyway. 

“It’s not a very good color,” Bucky says. “It’s actually really unpleasant to me.”

“I think it’s alright.”

“Well, what color don’t you like?” Bucky’s eyes flicker up to his. He’s been strange recently. Tense, erratic. It’s getting to both of them. Steve feels constantly on edge, as if he’s waiting for the penny to drop. For what, he doesn’t know.

He gusts out a breath. “I don’t know. Blue?”

Bucky nods understandingly. “Blue so bright it hurts your eyes.”

“Yeah, exactly.” 

Steve watches him from the couch. “Before” is such a poisonous concept. Even now, he can feel the full weight of it pressing down on him. He wishes that he wasn’t a person before. That he materialized fully formed from nothing. No history, no tragedy. Clean. 

Bucky rolls the tube of lipstick between his fingers, his expression contemplative. “Still, red isn’t a good choice. There are much better options.” He uncaps the lipstick. “Like grey.” He raises it so that’s it’s close to his own face and squints at it. “Or purple. Orange even. A nice dusky orange.”

“But not red,” Steve says, watching him carefully. 

Bucky pauses briefly and painstakingly applies the lipstick. “Not red,” he agrees and leans in to press his lips gently against Steve’s. “Never red.”

“Right. Okay,” Steve says and stands very still. He feels large and clumsy in his own body. 

Bucky leaning up and into him, red on his mouth, a hungry look in his eyes. Steve feels so very young, suddenly. As if they’re both just bordering on tipsy on some bootlegger’s swill, giddy and nervous from all the rumors of government poisoned booze. 

Bucky wipes off the lipstick with his sleeve. “You should know,” he says carefully, “I can’t see color anymore. They took it away.”

Steve has to close his eyes to keep from staggering. “But— _why?_ ”

“Apparently I responded to color too much. I got distracted. The right shade of yellow could pull me right out of a mission, and well, that’s not acceptable.”

“I—”

“No, don’t. There’s nothing we can do about it. I only brought it up because I want you to do something for me.” Bucky takes a breath, looking vulnerable for the first time since 1945. “I want you to teach me how to paint.”

 

* * *

 

 Bucky comes back one day, wringing water from his hair as he steps through the door. The sky is empty, save a few scudding clouds. He was probably at the river. There’s a little smile on his mouth.

For a while, everything’s quiet, and for once, it doesn’t bother him one whit. He thinks maybe he’s finally making peace.

Bucky sees him once his eyes adjust to the dimness of the house. Some of his thoughts must show on his face because the smile drops from Bucky’s face, and he asks, “What’re you smiling about?”

“Nothing.”

Bucky settles next to him and drops his head onto Steve’s shoulder. “Hey,” he says pushing his head away. “Your hair’s still wet.” Bucky doesn’t move and eventually Steve just lets him be. 

“Steve,” Bucky says.

“Hmm?”

Bucky’s quiet for a long time. It has a familiar quality to it. He gets like this when he’s gearing up to say something. “He’s still in here,” he finally says, “and he doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

“Who?”

“You know, him. The Soldier. Soldat.” Bucky gestures vaguely at his forehead. “He’s a good guy mostly. Just kind of—I don’t know, lost. Misguided.”

“Misguided,” Steve repeats.

“Yeah. He got real scared when Zemo started mucking around in my head, and—” Bucky clears his throat uncomfortably, “Well, he doesn’t deal with fear very well. It was sort of fine when we were in Bucharest. There wasn’t much to freak out about there, but the trigger words—you have no idea, Steve—they really did a number on him. He’s like a kid, I guess. He doesn’t know how to calm himself down, and I can’t do anything because he’s sort of stuck in this little corner where I can’t reach him.”

“So earlier,” Steve says, “was that you or him?”

“I don’t know. Both? When he freaks out, it kinda leaks out everywhere, and I start panicking too. Then I can’t calm down until he does, but well, that can take a while. And—” 

There’s the sharp tang of fear to his voice, and Steve had never thought he’d be relieved to hear it. It lends Bucky a sense of solidity, like he’s an actual tangible presence now. Before, if Bucky was out of his line of sight and didn’t make any noise for a while, Steve would forget that he was even there. Before, underneath the quiet, there was nothing. Now he’s radiating that particular brand of manic restlessness that had always characterized Bucky. 

“Do you think maybe we should just—I don’t know, start over?”

It takes a while for the words to really sink in. “Why?” Steve asks.

Bucky shrugs one-shouldered. His right arm is wedged between Steve and the couch. “Everything’s kind of complicated, I guess.” He glances away and looks like he wants to say more, but then he changes his mind. Instead, he pushes up and forward until he’s nose-to-nose with Steve. 

“You don’t say,” Steve says, and then Bucky’s pressing their mouths together. 

It strikes Steve as odd that in this, Bucky’s just a little clumsy. Uncertain somehow. He’s always been a good kisser, a charmer to the last. His mouth shifts and stutters like he’s not quite sure what to do, but it’s strange and sweet. Steve slides his fingers through Bucky’s still-damp hair. It’s somewhat tangled and sticks to their skin. 

He feels overly warm. Even though the sun had set hours ago, a memory of the afternoon heat still lingers like a warm palm pressing down. Bucky’s hand is balled up in Steve’s shirt, and he imagines that his eyes must be screwed shut. There’s almost this desperate edge to his kisses. He kisses like it will never be enough and it’s too much for him to handle. He kisses like he’s scared shitless. 

Eventually they both pull back, flushed and shaking. “Complicated,” Steve says. He can feel Bucky’s little puffs of breath against his skin. 

“Yeah, just a little,” Bucky says.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The Brooklyn of his memory was more sound than picture. 

Rose Kosler on the second floor held choral lessons in her apartment for a month before Mr. Quinn busted down her door to chew out her students for their godawful singing. Mr. Johnson had six chickens and two dogs that kicked up a ruckus every time someone walked past his door. Richie Malone never turned his radio off, and the girl he was seeing had an awful laugh like a witch’s maniacal cackle. He used to play the saxophone too. 

Mrs. Kirby always stood on the fire escape to holler at Mrs. Fehrenbacher two floors up for dumping her dirty water out the window. It was its own spectacle, almost as entertaining as the radio dramas. They came to blows one humid July when Mrs. Kirby poked her head out the window to yell, only to get a face-full of scummy dishwater. 

It was the worst during summer when there was no escaping the heat, and everyone was frayed to the point of snapping. Garbage baked in the hallways, the motley cooking odors merged into new, bizarre smells, milk went sour almost the moment it was set on the doorstep. 

Every so often, the letters Mr. Grimshaw was always writing to the Brooklyn Noise Abatement Commission would actually culminate in something. Then the cops or people from the Department of Health would come stomping around, banging on doors, and for maybe a day, everyone would shut up. 

But even when the neighbors were quiet, there was always something else. Some folks would roam till three in the morning hawking newspapers. The Renken dairy truck with its cut-out muffler rattled by at around four AM, and it made such a horrible racket that after a week, Bucky hauled himself out of bed to ask the driver what the hell was up. The driver said there was nothing he could do about it. It was an old truck, so they had to put up with the noise for the next two years. Ash collection was at five, and there was something about the sound of the ash sweepers scraping at coal furnace leavings that never failed to wake Steve up. 

Then there were the distant noises—a dim roar underneath the closer, more immediate sounds. The El clattering a couple streets over. The rumble of automobiles caught in traffic. The metal-cutting saws, jackhammers, pneumatic drills, riveters, and pile-drivers from nearby construction sites. There were the horns and whistles of the ferries and McAllister tugboats from the East River a few blocks away. He used to be able to hear the fog warning bell all the way from the docks of Manhattan Island. 

He has a crystal clear memory of staring down the super, Mr. Lefkowitz. Someone had shot his dog, a mean old thing with a squint, and Mr. Lefkowitz was going around, trying to find the culprit. He came after him and Bucky because at that point, Bucky had somehow gotten his hands on a pistol—an old Great War Colt—which made him the prime suspect. He has such a crisp image of Mr. Lefkowitz standing over the two of them. He was red-faced and shaking—this big ruddy man brought nearly to tears by the death of a dog. 

But that couldn’t be. 

Steve had gotten a job at that time cutting skins at a fur shop. The fellow who normally did it had gone out to the country that summer, and Steve was filling in. He would be out all day and part of the night because he wasn’t as fast as the other guy had been. Bucky had been alone in the ruckus with Mr. Lefkowitz, and Steve’d only heard about it second-hand. Just so. 

It used to be that Steve couldn’t see much further than arms-length, and everything else was guesswork. Before the serum, the images were always a bit hazy and sepia-toned like an old photograph. He honestly can’t tell what parts are real and what parts are filled in by his brain. Brooklyn wasn’t the grey tenements, the seamstresses picking bits of thread and cloth from their jackets, the grimy dogs in the street, sunlight leaking through a cracked window, the ice truck driver kicking his bumper. That was his ma’s Brooklyn—Bucky’s Brooklyn. 

Steve’s Brooklyn would always be this unending clamor. The way people were folded in, stacked on top of each other—he had always felt squeezed in by the noise. It was pushy and obnoxious, and Steve didn’t even realize how much he would miss it until he woke up in the future. This unassailable identity picked up, swept clean, painted over until it was nigh unrecognizable. 

The future is so goddamn _quiet_. Car engines are these electric hums instead of asthmatic metal lungs. The lightbulbs stopped whining. No one keeps chickens and pigs in the apartment buildings anymore. The walls are thick enough that you never hear your neighbors’ conversations unless they’re yelling, and people have headphones to listen to music now. Steve had spent his entire life wishing for just one minute of peace and quiet, and now he has it in spades. 

He turns on the radio even though the signal’s too weak for anything but a garbled voice and static. It’s just nice to have something to listen to.

 

* * *

There’s a faint sound audible over the ambient creaks and groans of the house. It’s enough to draw Steve out of sleep, but he lies in his bed for a long time, wondering what it was that woke him up. Underneath the fresh paint and the new wallpaper, this is an old house. It settles slowly and heavily into its foundations, sinking further into the ground with every year. 

The wind sighs through the eaves of the house, and just under that sound is a murmur. A masculine voice, barely audible, and the rustling of clothing and bare feet on wood flooring. Steve swings his legs over the edge of the bed and walks into the living room. Bucky is sitting on the floor of the kitchen, his back against the cupboards, his legs stretched out in front of him. He is sitting on a bed of old newspapers, and in his hand is a tube of oil paint.

None of the house lights are on, but the porch light and the moon shine in between the curtains. Steve walks over to his side and settles down next to him. Bucky shuffles a little to make room, and the newspapers crinkle underneath him, but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge him. He’s squinting at the label of the paint tube. There’s a dozen other tubes scattered beside him.

“Burnt sienna,” Bucky says, sliding his thumb nail over the cap. “What’s it look like?”

There’s a pressure building up behind Steve’s eyes. His throat feels raw and scratchy, and for a moment, he isn’t sure he can speak.

“It’s—it’s like,” he clears his throat before continuing, “remember that big writing desk in Mr. Fieseler’s room?”

“Yeah, it was the only thing he kept from his old house after he lost his job and moved to the third floor.”

Steve remembers sitting on the ratty upholstery of the man’s couch, his ma and Mr. Fieseler standing in the kitchen talking in low voices. The husky tones of her voice layered over the well-educated baritone of his is strangely vivid even now. He remembers how the sound made him brave, and he stood up to peer at the hulking desk under the window. Years of sitting in the sun had bleached out some of its color. The underside of the desk was a rich, dark color, but the top of it had paled to a warmer brown.

“Think of the lightest patch of wood on that desk,” Steve says. “That’s burnt sienna.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, but he carefully twists the cap off one-handedly and squeezes the tube until a bit of paint oozes out onto his hand. He rubs his fingers together and says, “It’s kind of slimy.”

Steve reaches over and touches the paint on Bucky’s hand and finds that he’s right. There’s more oil in the paint than some others, and the pigment slides easily against his skin. He smiles, and they both wipe off the paint on the newspapers they’re sitting on.

Bucky picks up another tube and reads the name on the label aloud—cobalt blue. It’s the color of the East River on an especially sunny day. The paint is thicker and more viscous than the burnt sienna, and they leave smears of blue over a headline announcing the unusually hot weather of the summer. Next is yellow ochre—smooth and the color of the muddy light of the street lamps. The mixing white feels softer than the titanium white, which is thick like toothpaste.

By the time, the sun is up, this whole thing has taken on the sheen of ritual as they steadily work their way through all the oil paint colors. It’s strange—this reversal in position. Bucky used to describe the colors of things to Steve before the war. And when he could finally _see_ color, Bucky would bring him bright little baubles to show him what purple really _looked_ like, isn’t that amazing, Stevie? He supposes it’s his turn now.

Their hands and the newspapers are caked with paint by the time they’re finished, and they have to wait three hours for Natasha to come to turn on the tap for them and let them wash their hands. It’s a good day.

 

* * *

 

It’s an excellent diversion—painting, he means. He’d honestly forgotten how soothing he found it. Steve sits on the porch with a stretch of canvas set up, watching a great cloud of dust build on the horizon. He doesn’t know where it came from, and for once in his life, he feels no need to investigate the source and inevitably entangle himself in more trouble. His ma would be proud.

He has it all blocked in already. The flat plains stretching out for miles on end, the edge of the porch, the dust cloud pooling in the sky. It’s a pretty thing. Red dust billowing ever higher in big, round puffs. It’s stark, almost picturesque against the bleached-out blue of the sky. The sun is bloated and white. He’d used a bright red to sketch out the shapes. The flashes of crimson will show through even as he layers less saturated colors over it.

He leans back on his elbows and feels the sweat trickle down his arms. The smell of turpentine and oil settles around him—sharp and heavy and nostalgic. It’s been a while since he last sent flowers to Peggy, he thinks idly. Maybe he’ll do magnolias next. 

He hasn’t felt this content in a long time.

Bucky is beside him, a tiny round brush gripped in his hand, scowling at the giant tree spreading its branches next to the house. He’s much further along in his painting than Steve, but he has no patience for the traditional regimented painting process. Draw the sketch, paint the wash, keep your darks thin and your lights thick, start with the broad impressions then hone in on details, step back, check the composition, paint, breathe.

The tree on Bucky’s canvas is slanted, the trunk almost lost amidst the liberal splashes of color. He hasn’t touched the green once. Steve gets that. There’s something cathartic about the act of putting paint on canvas. Getting the look of something right is secondary. He smiles, but his face is angled away so Bucky doesn’t see it.

Steve looks back at his dust cloud. He’d wanted to make it loom, the red in it leaking out and seeping into the sky, the grass, the trees. It slowly spreads across the canvas, eventually it might blot out the sun. There’s an audible snap next to him, and Steve turns to see that Bucky’s little brush has broken in two. He looks down at the splintered wood in his hand with panic beginning to rise on his face. Embarrassment flushes his cheeks. His back is a rigid line of tension.

Steve opens his mouth, but the moment passes, and Bucky’s features smooth over into something resembling self-deprecating amusement.

“Can’t even hold a paintbrush right,” he says with a snort and sets it aside.

Steve catches on quickly, and with an inaudible sigh of relief, he adds, “It’s a wonder you managed to pick them up in the first place with those mitts of yours.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Your hands are bigger than mine, genius.”

“Please, my hands are dainty as hell. Like a lady’s.”

Bucky catches his wrist, pulls his hand into his lap, and squints down at it. Steve’s hands are bigger, but his fingers are long and slim where Bucky’s are broad and blunt-tipped. There are knots and scars on the skin of his palm that Steve’s never seen before. He traces a finger over a pale clump of scar tissue on the back of Bucky’s hand. A knife wound. Someone had stabbed the blade clean through to the other side. Their hands side-by-side make an odd picture. Bucky’s is a patchwork of callouses and old, healed-over wounds whereas Steve’s are a clean stretch of pale, unmarred skin.

Bucky touches a spot at the web of his hand, just above his thumb. He frowns.

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says. “They’re all gone.”

He used to have a little starburst scar there since forever. He’d been running after Bucky around a street corner, tripped on the curb, and split his hand open on a piece of broken glass. Bucky had freaked and ran all the way home with Steve on his back, shouting the whole way, “’m fine! I’m fine! God, Buck, lemme down!”

“That’s kinda freaky. You don’t have any calluses either.” Bucky’s frown deepens. “Your hands are soft.”

Steve shrugs. He doesn’t really know what to say to that. He splits his skin open when he wields an axe or throws his shields without gloves on. But it doesn’t really matter because it’ll all scab over and heal up by the time he takes a second look. It was a thing of horror to see—blood trickling down his arms from wounds that had long since knitted themselves closed. 

Back in Brooklyn, his skin had been tough and leathery. Painters calluses and baseball calluses and calluses from skinning his palms on the streets and from the rough edges of grocers crates. It used to be that you could get the measure of a man from the first handshake. Then he woke up in the new century with smooth hands and soft skin.

 

* * *

 

There’s a particular luxury of having a bathroom to themselves. Bucky’s sitting in the sudsy water, and Steve’s leaning over him, working shampoo into his hair. They’ve covered his left arm with a shower cap to keep the water out of the wiring, and it’s just a little bit absurd. Bucky is listing to the side a little, his eyelids fluttering, strands of dark hair sliding down his shoulders. Steve’s hip is pressed into the rim of the tub, and his shirt is soaked almost all the way through.

They used to have to wait in line. No matter how early in the morning they woke up, there were always a few people ahead of them. By the time it was their turn, the bath water would always be grey and tepid. Now, they have to wait a half-hour for the temperamental water heater to start up, and sometimes the water comes out the tap rusty. But Steve would take that any day over being the ninth person to bathe in a half-full tub of murky water.

The sound of dripping water and their breathing echoes strangely. The light bulbs above the mirror sputter and flicker, and Bucky tenses for a moment when the bathroom is plunged into near darkness. A strip of sunlight streams in below the door. Bucky leans into Steve’s hand and says, “Hey, say something.”

“We could go dancing,” Steve says. That’s what people do, he thinks. They get drunk in a dance hall and fall in love for the night. 

Bucky smiles. “I think I’ve actually forgotten how.”

“Oh, you can’t be worse than me. I kept knocking into things after the serum. Everything sorted itself out eventually, but I never relearned how to dance.”

“That’s a shame. You had a solid sense of rhythm,” Bucky says, then lets out a tentative laugh. “Oh god, I completely forgot you were a show girl.”

Steve pushes Bucky’s shoulder. The water sloshes around the rim of the tub when he moves. “I was doing my part for the war effort.”

“Don’t lie. You were bored out of your mind.”

“Maybe,” Steve says. “I did look good in tights. The serum’s good for something, I guess.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You always looked good in tights,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes. “You remember that dame who liked you?”

“Oh god, I do. Mary or Margie—”

“Marjorie. Marjorie Sigel.”

“Christ, you remember her better than I do,” Steve says.

“She was a memorable gal,” Bucky says. He starts to laugh. It’s the same harsh bray that he never learned to dial down because Brooklyn was so goddamn noisy, no one else but Steve could hear him over the din. “She got you to—” Bucky breaks off to guffaw. 

“I know—”

“She got you to wear her stockings. I walk in, and you’re in nothing but a shirt and nylons—” 

“You wouldn’t stop laughing for weeks,” Steve says.

“You were so flustered. You hustled her out of there so quick, you didn’t get the chance to return them. And then we were just standing there, staring at each other like a pair of idiots.”

Steve can feel the tips of his ears heating up. “Then you rolled me up against the wall and said something about how we may as well make use of the opportunity.”

“Well, it’s not like we were ever gonna get that chance again.” Bucky’s smile goes crooked. “And you were so _loud_.”

“Shaddup,” Steve says. Christ, he’s definitely blushing now. Eighty years later, and he’s still worked up about it. “Not like anyone would hear us. What with Esther Lake and Jerome whats-his-name—”

“—Condevan. God, you’re awful at this.”

“Right next door! They were louder than Mr. Johnson’s dogs.”

“And the radio blasting Benny Goodman at all hours of the night.”

“Exactly,” Steve says. “So it didn’t matter how loud _I_ was.”

He can see how Bucky is resettling as the conversation draws on. There are bumps and pauses in his speech like he’s trying to remember what to say, but the old bantering patterns are easy to pick up again. The tensions winds down from his shoulders, and his smile starts to turn genuine.

Bucky grins. “But boy, Marjorie was a bitty thing, and they still were too big for you. The ends flopping around—”

“Oh god, stop. As if you didn’t have a thing for lipstick.”

“You did too!”

“You infected me! I didn’t give a damn until you got so goddamn eager—”

Bucky leans in close and kisses him, slick and easy and confident. Just like he used to. It shuts Steve up real fast, and he can’t help but press into it impatiently. He grips Bucky’s hair firmly, their tongues sliding together. Steve bites at his lower lip, and Bucky huffs a laugh into his mouth. It’s like kissing him for the first time in decades.

Bucky pushes up further and reaches for his shoulder. He curls his hand into the collar of Steve's shirt as he deepens the kiss. His chest is pressed into Steve's. Water splashes out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor, soaking into the cloth of his pants. They're both sopping wet, and Bucky pulls back for a moment to look at Steve with bright, hungry eyes. They remain there, breathing each other's air, their foreheads pressed together. Steve closes his eyes and listens to musical plinking of water on tile and Bucky's faint gasps for air. 

Bucky surges forward again, his grip on his shirt tightening, and Steve's knees slip out from underneath him. They topple backward and land on the bathroom floor. Steve hits his head against the ground, and Bucky's weight coming down on top of him knocks the breath out of his lungs. They lie stunned for a long moment. Bucky's elbow is pressing uncomfortably just below Steve's ribs, and they're both dripping water everywhere.

"That hurt like a _bitch_ ," Steve says, and Bucky huffs a laugh. 

"We're such romantics, huh?"

"There's no turn on quite like nearly cracking my head open on the bathroom floor."

"Hey, how was I supposed to know you wouldn't go for that? Any guy would start to wonder what with all the fights you start.”

" _Bucky_ ," Steve says.

"I always knew you got your rocks off on pain, Stevie," Bucky says and presses a light kiss on the underside of his chin before clambering off of him. He stands up carefully with his hand braced on the rim of the tub. Steve pulls himself to his feet and they stand next to each other in front of the mirror. The glass has fogged up a little with the heat rolling off the water, but they're both still visible—two blurry figures standing shoulder to shoulder. 

Steve looks at Bucky's reflection. The shower cap had fallen off his left arm, and it's the first time in a while that he really got a look at the place where the metal arm used to be. The metal is still almost mirror-bright, and he wonders how he never noticed Bucky setting aside time to polish it and keep it clean. 

The wires used to be stripped back in places, exposing metal synthetic nerves, but somehow, Bucky had found some rubber wire caps to insulate them. The jagged metal shards seared black by Tony's repulsor blast have been filed down to round edges. Everything about it screams meticulous time and care, but Steve had never noticed. Maybe he hadn't wanted to look. 

He's never taken himself for a coward before.

Bucky is looking at him too. Steve can only imagine what he sees. He's some caricaturist's imagining of Steve Rogers. A hyper-idealized picture of a man. Everything so perfectly proportioned and calculated that it starts to become uncanny. There's a stricken expression on his face when he looks at Steve. He looks almost terrified. 

"You alright?" Steve asks.

Bucky starts a little at the sound of his voice. He reaches behind him and pulls a towel off the rack. He wraps himself tightly in it, pressing his nose into the terry cloth, his damp hair falling forward to cover his face. He looks small and oddly bedraggled. "Yeah," he says. "I'm okay."

 

* * *

There are days where everything is too bright and oversaturated. The edges of objects too crisp and sharp and distracting. Movement flickering in his peripheries. It’s overwhelming when all his life, the world around him was soft and blurry.

The colors of the oil paints are lurid. He finds himself fixating more on the over-brightness than the actual painting. Bucky’s paintings are scattered all over the house, letting the oils dry, but Steve has only managed two pieces since they started. When he paints, he can only think about the ones he did in Brooklyn. 

Some of his old sketchbooks ended up at the Smithsonian, but those aren’t the ones he wonders about. There were paintings he’d done under another name during a short stint as a commercial artist for some menswear advertisements, and they were all studies of Bucky. 

Bucky sitting in an armchair with a hand against his cheek and his legs crossed. Bucky’s back turned as the light from a window falls on his shoulders. Bucky with his hair slicked back, his collar crooked against his neck, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Bucky leaning his hip against a table, his eyes cast down, his lashes catching the light, his hand splayed just so.

He found out recently that no one had ever looked at the sharp, glossy white lines and muted taupes of his commercial work and thought of Steve. It’s a relief. This small portion of his life that he’s allowed to keep for himself, unadulterated by the specter of Captain America as everything else in his life has been. Even Bucky—especially Bucky. It seems a crime to paint now when he feels more Captain America than Steve Rogers. So the brush spins aimlessly in his hand, and he turns to his sketchbooks.

The Smithsonian will never find a single drawing of Bucky. He knows they’ve looked. They’ve sifted through private collections and archives, looking for the fluidity and tinges of color, a certain spontaneity to the lines that have always characterized his drawings. And not a glimpse of Bucky.

He heard once that there were historians who theorized that Steve Rogers hadn’t met James Barnes at all before the war. They looked at the dozens of drawings of his ma, his neighbors, the building super, acquaintances and WPA friends, the gangs of kids on the next block, even the sour-faced landlord when he deigned to visit the tenement. But no Bucky. 

They posited that the charming stories of two scrappy kids playing stickball had been fabricated entirely by the American propaganda machine. And well, yes, most of those stories aren’t true. There was nothing remotely idyllic about being on the cusp of manhood in the worst years of the Depression. But Bucky had always been there. 

Steve’d just never drawn him.

The way Steve builds paint on a canvas has always suited the structured, almost geometric lines of Bucky’s face. His square hands and angular jaw, the slightly hooded eyes, the crinkled lines in his clothes, the hard planes of muscle under his skin. Bucky had been a man made to be painted, never drawn. 

Steve’s drawings have always been more suited to softer, rounder features. He drew the girls he saw at dance halls a lot. There’s just something about being in one at the height of evening. The band working themselves up into a lather, the sound of shoe soles on lacquered wood, and the warm press of bodies all around him. A girl would collapse on the chairs lining the walls of the room, loose-limbed with exhaustion--and Steve would draw her. Her close-cropped hair, her skirt pooling around her, and her legs, well-muscled from the hours of dancing. By the time, he finished the sketch, he would be half in love with her already. Then she would be up and slipping into the crowd, and the moment would pass.

He used to draw Peggy too, but there had always been a sharpness to her that made him long for his oils. Some of her sketches had been on display in the Smithsonian, and he wishes they hadn’t picked those. It makes his chest tighten to see her face in pencil lines on carefully preserved paper and remember drawing them filled with the thrill of waiting. Waiting for the war to be over, waiting to go home, waiting to finally paint Peggy and get it right.

He takes a breath.

Bucky had wandered into the room sometime in the past hour, and Steve has drawn nothing. He is sitting in the armchair by the window with his legs hanging over the sides. His feet are bare. There’s a cigarette in his right hand, and every so often, he curves it up to his mouth and breathes the smoke out slowly through his teeth. Bucky’d figured out how to button up his shirt one-handedly somehow, but it seems that he gave up halfway up his chest. His left side is pressed into the chair, and for a moment, he looks whole again. 

He could sketch Bucky, he thinks. He’s a different man now then he was before, and maybe paint doesn’t suit him so much now. He would be sharp lines and cold undertones. Any hint of the softness, the vulnerability still in him would be covered completely. 

Steve follows the curve of Bucky’s shoulder with his pencil. The half-lidded gaze, smoke twisting in fat, grey coils above his head, his toes curling and uncurling. If this were 1943, and Steve kissed him now, his mouth would taste like lighter fluid. His hair would be short, and he would be down about half-a-hundred scars. There would be vaudeville on the radio just a few rooms over. 

Now is quiet. Now is the steady scratch of pencil on paper and not much else. Now is the two of them sitting in the same room together, both somehow, miraculously alive.

 

* * *

When the Captain America files were declassified in 1970, and his name became public, the recovery and preservation of the Steve Rogers sketches became an obsession amongst WWII enthusiasts. When a historian thought his name, they did not think of uniform, shield, impossible feats of heroism. They thought of the hundreds of informal sketches documenting the decades before the war. They thought of a trove of insight, of glimpses into the murky realities of the Depression. 

His legacy had made him a distinguished but somewhat obscure actor within the larger, grander drama of the war. After all, Captain America was a figure of some note, but one whose influence wasn’t quite as far-reaching as the Rosies or the Uncle Sams. 

Those who paid attention remembered him, but most didn’t. History textbooks featured his drawings more frequently than his face. He had about the same amount of coverage as the Japanese-American internment camps—a skinny paragraph to acknowledge that he was there and it happened, but clearly impatient to move on to the Holocaust.

He would’ve been remembered more if he had died later. If Captain America had been on the front lines of Paris, marching through the streets, cut down by machine gunfire but giving that vital, final push to turn the tide of battle—they would’ve remembered. Hail Mary missions into secret enemy bases don’t get covered in the propaganda reels. It would have seemed like he simply disappeared a few months before the most famous parts of the war started to happen. 

But people remembered when he came back. When they saw the uniform and the shield from their dimly recalled history classes, they remembered. They retroactively painted his legacy as something larger, more prominent in the popular consciousness. As if he would be insulted that he was forgotten. 

It’s a good thing they forgot, he thinks. Icons so strongly tied to the patriotism of the so-called good old days, those are abused. Those are trotted out to drum up support for someone else’s agenda. He’s glad that he was never famous enough for his face to be used like that.

He’s even gladder that no one bothered to remember Bucky at all. The last century had already done him enough damage without someone using his image to start up an ideological crusade. 

 

* * *

Bucky’s paintings always seem to be infused with memory. The rough edges of his work betray his inexperience, but there’s a quality to his painting that Steve’s never seen before. A certain honesty.

Recently, he’s been fixated on the girls he used to go around with. There’s Helene with her face tilted up, her eyes looking at some distant point. He remembers her. She was a little blonde slip of a girl. She made a decent showing at the Lindy hop and could foxtrot with the best of them. There’d been a sweetness about her that dissuaded you from looking deeper. Hell, she even managed to sweat pretty. But there came a day when she saw a man with rolled-up cuffs, knocking back hard whiskey, and found him to be the more appealing dance partner.

Steve looks at the bowed lips and the sweep of her brow, and it really is startling how detailed Bucky’s memory can be sometimes. Her hair is a vaguely blonde haze framing her face, the position of her hands and the angle of her body are off somehow, but he got the little scrunch in her nose just right. 

Bucky’s out on the porch again with everything all laid out. The painting he’s starting today is sketched out and roughed in, and he’s futzing with the colors on his pallet. Steve leans against the bannister, watching him work. Bucky paints quickly and casually. He makes progress much faster than Steve, who takes his time building up the thin layers of colors.

There’s a slightly upturned nose and a high forehead, and the girl in the painting is looking just off centered from the viewer. Her expression is very obviously _bored_ , and Steve smiles when he recognizes her. She was a working girl, a real firecracker with dark pin-curled hair, a ruddy complexion, and a bit of a mean streak. All razor edges and a sharper tongue. It was impossible to impress Dot, but Bucky tried anyway. It was hilarious, watching his antics, but they’d both long before accepted that Dot would bend for no man.

Bucky carefully renders the slightly pockmarked skin of her cheek, and Steve sees her as Bucky had seen her. He makes her beautiful here. He makes them all beautiful, and he wonders what he would make Steve look like.

“You kissed her,” Bucky says after a while. “Peggy’s…”

“Grand-niece.”

Bucky’s frowning, and he swipes red onto Dot’s mouth. “Yeah, that. Why?”

“I—she takes after Peggy in a way. I looked at her, and I don’t know, I remembered what it was like to be falling in love with Peggy for the first time.”

“So she’s what? A stand-in?” There’s an edge of something dangerous creeping into Bucky’s voice.

“No. I just—the same quality that makes Peggy so compelling, she has that. A kind of steel in her. She had that same smile, and I just couldn’t help it, I guess.”

“And after?” he asks quietly.

“We’re different people.”

“You can be a real bastard, you know that?” Bucky starts on the skin between Dot’s brow. The faintest impression of a wrinkle forms there, and her expression begins to verge on irritation. 

“Yeah.” Steve sighs. “I know.”

“Just because she’s not what? Not Peggy? Does that make her not good enough for you?” Bucky rubs his face and groans. “God, she really is just someone for you to project your fucked-up feelings onto.”

“It’s—complicated,” he says. It’s a thin excuse, and they both know it. “I haven’t seen her since then, and well, I have you, don’t I?”

“Don’t fucking use me as an excuse, you son of a bitch,” Bucky snaps. “Does she _know_?”

Steve has not felt this small in a long time. “No.” 

Bucky stands abruptly, and for a moment, Steve thinks he’s going to break something. Instead, he carefully sets his paintbrush down and turns to Steve. He realizes that he’s never seen Bucky truly angry since he came back. Not like this. He doesn’t simply stand when he’s this furious. No, he _looms_.

“I can’t believe this,” Bucky says. “How am I better than you at dealing with my own shit? You had three extra years in your cushy midtown Manhattan apartment with a legion of psychiatrists at your beck and call, and you’re still fucked up. Christ, Steve, I managed to stitch my brain back together in some shithole in _Romania_.”

He slumps. There’s no winning this. Not when Bucky’s right. “I—I really don’t have an excuse.”

“No, you fucking don’t. Now here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to call Nat, ask her to help you find wherever Sharon’s holed herself up, and you’re going to talk things over with her like a fucking adult. I can’t believe I have to say this shit.”

Bucky bangs into the house, leaving his brushes and Dot’s half-finished face on the porch. Steve follows him inside just in time to see him slam the phone handset out of its cradle. It swings on its cord, knocking against the wall, and Bucky lets it hang there. He sends Steve a pointed look and crosses his arms.

Steve sighs and catches the phone at the height of its upswing. He listens to the sound of the dial tone for a long moment before turning to the fridge where Natasha had left the number for her most recent burner phone. The muffled click of the call connecting is loud in his ear, and there is silence on the other end.

“Natasha,” Steve says.

There’s a minute pause. In it, he can feel her parsing through the sound of his voice for a slightly misplaced inflection or an unnatural edge. Maybe he hears the faintest sound of her breathing. 

“Yes?” Natasha finally says after she’s determined that he’s neither a simulated voice nor an impersonator. Bucky is watching him, hawk-like.

“I—do you know where Sharon is?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick citation! The sounds I described at the beginning of this chapter were all taken from this excellent resource, [The Roaring Twenties](http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html)! It's an online interactive map that shows you the noise complaints and their transcripts of New York during the twenties and thirties! It's a _dream_ for the historical stucky fan.
> 
> Please check out this absolutely wonderful art on [Ria's tumblr](https://artbyria.tumblr.com/post/164442713915/by-the-time-the-sun-is-up-this-whole-thing-has)!


	3. Chapter 3

Sharon meets him at Flagstaff in a cafe that’s been around almost as long as he has. It’s a point of pride for the place. It’s been around so long that it’s marked as a historic landmark, and it’s kinda funny because he’s one too. When he walks in, he feels oddly transported. The decor hasn’t changed much since its opening, that much is obvious. 

It has the sensibilities and fixtures that Steve will always recognize as modern, but everyone else in the world will see as old-fashioned. Dated. Quaint. The long bar, the white walls paneled with pinewood, the shiny, green booths, and the odd touches that lend it character. A stuffed swordfish and a Pepsi clock are mounted on the wall. 

It’s a couple hours before the regular lunch crowd would probably come in, so the cafe is almost entirely empty save a man nursing his coffee in a corner booth. The owners poke their heads out the kitchen to greet him. They are a Chinese couple in their sixties—both older and younger than him, which is something he will never be used to. They ask him if he’s heading up to the Grand Canyon. No, ma’am, just meeting a friend. Aren’t you a polite young man. Thank you, sir. 

The husband wanders over to the man sipping coffee, obviously a regular, and they start to chat about a recent fishing trip. A girl takes his order, and he settles back in his seat to wait for his food or Sharon, whichever arrives first. The wife plies him with questions with the idle curiosity of a small town native meeting a stranger. He answers vaguely, and picking up on his cues, she backs off and starts to talk through the local gossip. 

The girl who took Steve’s order is their daughter-in-law. A few days ago, an old high school friend of her husband’s dropped in for a visit. They hadn’t seen her for over eighteen years, and suddenly, she showed back up with her teenage daughter, who can put away food like nobody’s business, I tell you. The owner of the dealership a few blocks over, his son overdosed in college a few years back, isn’t that a shame? 

It passes the time pleasantly, and Steve’s chicken fried steak arrives before Sharon does. He eats slowly, watching the regular crowd trickle in. Sharon finally shows up at the height of the lunch hour, sliding into the empty seat next to him at the bar. She orders when the waitress swings around the bar to get to them. 

She’d cropped her hair short sometime in the last few months. It makes her jaw seem less round, sharpening her features.

“I have to be honest, Steve,” she says, “I didn’t expect to hear from you for a long time.”

“I—we left things at a weird place.”

The skin around her eyes crinkles when she smiles at him. “As sweet as the gesture is, I really hope you didn’t pull us both out of hiding for some sort of romantic rendezvous.”

“No,” Steve says. “It’s not that.”

“Has something happened?” Her tone is clipped and professional. She flicks a look around the cafe, gauging threat levels. “We don’t have a lot of resources right now, but Natasha’s been rebuilding relations with Wakanda. It may set negotiations back a bit, but we might be able to arrange for—”

“Sharon.” She stops at the sound of his voice and sends him an assessing look. “I haven’t exactly been fair to you.”

She sighs and rubs her temples. “Steve, you fucking idiot. Did you really jeopardize both of our safeties because you want _closure_?”

“No! It’s just—I shouldn’t have kissed you. After Peggy died.”

Sharon looks at him quietly for a long time before sighing again, reaching forward, and linking their hands together. “I wondered how long it’d take you to figure it out,” she says quietly. He can barely hear her over the ambient noise.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not blind, Steve. I knew from the start that I would most likely be a—surrogate for my great-aunt. It was kinda flattering to be honest. We don’t really look alike, but you still saw something of her in me. And there are worse people to be compared to.” She laughs, and the sound is remarkably free from resentment. She strokes her thumb over the back of his hand. “But I didn’t hold any illusions. You’ve got a lot of baggage to work through, and I was never going to be the person to help you deal with it. We both deserve better than that.”

“You’re not angry?”

She smiles again. There’s a familiar fondness in her expression and a bitterness he’s never seen before. Maybe he just hadn’t noticed it until now. “I was angry once, but not anymore. God, you have no idea how pissed I was the first time I noticed the way you looked at me. You didn’t know Aunt Peggy and I were related, but it would come up eventually, and that’s no basis for anything healthy. But I’ve had a few years to sort through my anger, and now? Now, I’m just tired, I guess. You’re a good guy, but I know better than to subject myself to you.”

Steve winces. “I deserved that.”

“You really do. You’ve got great moral fiber, but my god, you can be such a jackass.”

“You’re really enjoying yourself right now, aren’t you?”

Sharon laughs. “Maybe a little.”

Steve tightens his grip on her hand. She’s just so…practical about it all. That’s what drew him to her in the first place, this pragmatism that he thought he’d never see in this century. It’s ironic that even as they’re parting ways, he’s reminded of why he was so attracted to her in the first place.

“You have to know,” Steve says. “I never meant for this to happen. I really did want this to work.”

“I know, Steve. I know you were trying to do right by me.”

Sharon’s food arrives, and Steve lets her eat in silence. The owner’s wife catches his eye and sends him a sympathetic look, clearly reading into the situation correctly. He shrugs and offers a small smile in return. He occupies himself with looking at the little bowl of oranges on the back counter, the golden cat sitting on its haunches with its left paw raised, a couple of red paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. 

“I wouldn’t head straight home if I were you,” Sharon says as she finishes eating. “I picked up a tail at around Kingman and haven’t had the chance to shake him yet. Hang around for a couple days. Check out the canyon. I hear it’s nice this time of year.”

“Thanks,” Steve says.

Sharon pushes away from the counter and begins to make for the door. “And don’t you _dare_ call me again unless it’s a genuine emergency,” she says when she passes Steve and then she’s gone.

“Right,” he says.

 

* * *

The drive up to the Grand Canyon is different from how he’d imagined it would be. He thought it’d be all dry desert for miles around, and you could see the canyon coming from a long way off. Not so. It sneaks up on you. One moment, there’s nothing but scrubby trees and underbrush. Then a break in the vegetation, and a great, big maw opens up in the earth. It’s stunning.

He stares at the craggy outcroppings along the scenic overlooks, the skinny little trails winding through the canyon, the oranges and reds and purples. It had been smaller in his mind, but standing here, leaning out as far as the low rock wall will allow him, it’s too much for even his imagination to dream up. The other rim of the canyon is so distant that it’s just a barely visible silhouette in the atmospheric haze. Christ, he feels like a kid. It’s been so goddamn long since he last felt simply dwarfed by something else’s immensity.

It’s a long time before he gets back in his car, and he hopes that any hypothetical tailers also got the chance to enjoy the view. Steve starts the engine and begins the long trip back. He loses his tail sometime after he crosses into New Mexico as he passes through Gallup.

 

* * *

It’s in the grey hours of the evening when the state lines have started to blur together. The drive home seems so much longer without the anxiety and the anticipation filling up the hours. There is a certainty to the lonely house on the plains with its shuttered windows and Bucky waiting for him. He really doesn’t know where he is, but the highway stretches on ahead of him, and as long as he follows the vague impression of ‘east’, he’ll find his way eventually. 

It’s easy to question yourself when there’s nothing to occupy your thoughts but the hum of the engine, the fields, the streetlights, the endless road. It’s an odd purgatory—neither at the destination nor the starting point. And he doesn’t know why his thoughts have taken this turn. He doesn’t deal in abstractions or philosophical meandering. Sometimes, a road is just a road, and to impart any more meaning would be—pointless.

Out of the corners of his eyes, he catches glimpses of red. The streetlights flicker on as night closes in. He watches their reflections scroll on the windshield and flicks the radio dial. It had been static before, but this time, it manages to pick up a signal. A distorted voice singing. He tries to identify the language, but it’s oddly hard to pin down. There is the sharp rise and fall of Cantonese, and then the nasal quality of French, then the guttural ending to a word like German. Sometimes he picks up on the vocal frying favored by Hawaiian singers. The radio turns off abruptly.

Somehow, he isn’t surprised when she appears beside him.

“Wanda,” he says.

She hasn’t changed much, but it’s hard to tell with her sitting in the passenger seat, her knees tucked close to her body. Her wrists are thinner than he remembers, her bones more prominent, and even in the patchy lighting, it’s obvious that her skin has taken on a sallow cast. 

It strikes him anew—just how young she is. He looks at her, and Christ, she’s younger now than he was when he chose to take the serum. There’s a restlessness to her that he remembers well. An unsurety, a need to prove herself. It’s not hard to imagine how they would have convinced her to submit to their experiments. It’s disturbing how easy it would be. After all, he himself had gone gladly.

“You should watch the road,” she says. 

Steve flicks his gaze away from her. “As if anything could happen to either of us if we actually crashed.”

“We’d be stranded, and hitch-hiking isn’t the best strategy for international fugitives.”

He can’t help but smile at the dryness in her voice. “How’ve you been? Where’ve you been holing up?” Steve doesn’t even have to look to know she’s frowning at him. “It’s not like the ‘no sharing locations’ rule applies here. You’d just make me forget the information.”

“Then what’s the point of telling you in the first place?”

“For my peace of my mind,” he says. “I like knowing you’re doing well for yourself, Wanda.”

“I’m not hiding anywhere.”

They drive in silence for a while before it clicks, and Steve laughs and slaps the steering wheel. “Very clever. Why hide when you can make people forget they saw you?”

She’s smiling. Maybe there’s a little flush of pride in her cheeks. It’s good seeing her happy. That happens for her less often than he would like. “It’s not like I’m not careful,” she says, “but it makes things easier when slipping up doesn’t really have—consequences.”

“I’m glad,” Steve says, and he means it. A coil of red plays over the dashboard, and the radio crackles back to life. It’s the song from earlier. Wanda tilts her head a little, furrowing her brow, and the signal sharpens until the sound is crisp. The song is in Sokovian—a light, happy melody. She begins to hum along. 

“You’ve been going to hospitals,” he says.

“You noticed?”

“I think the entire country did.”

Miracles, some said. Acts of god, said others. Coincidence, said the skeptics. Regardless, they noticed. All the ill and dying in a hospital standing as one and walking out onto the streets, whole and healthy. The heartsick in a VA laying down their burdens, weeping and ready to reclaim their lives. It’s hard not to notice.

“I can—you know.” She gestures vaguely, a red spark flicking off her fingertips. “I can do more. Be more. I don’t just—break things.”

“I know,” He says and hesitates for a moment before asking, “Have you ever—helped Bucky?”

“He said no.” 

“He—why?”

She fidgets with a little ball of light. The car is quiet except for the radio singing in Sokovian and Wanda murmuring to herself. The sharp edges of her accent have softened, though it’s still present despite her efforts to tamp it down. Steve thinks about his own Brooklyn drawl. He’d tried the slurred consonants and choppy vowels once when he was alone, but it was like trying to slip into an old skin that didn’t quite fit anymore.

“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” Wanda says to herself and then, to Steve, “I have a memory. Bucky’s memory.”

 

* * *

“He’s still in here,” Bucky says and taps a finger to his forehead. “It wouldn’t be fair to him if I just—purged everything.”

“Would you miss him?” Her voice is soft and self-conscious. Bucky can tell she is more accustomed to speaking in silences and half-gestures, and he understands, suddenly, her history—the sharp little tragedies. She had a mother and a father once. She had a brother once.

Bucky clears his throat. “I would, yeah. It scares the shit out of me, but sometimes, it’s nice to know that the triggers still work on me. It means he’s still kicking around, you know?” She nods, but he doesn’t think she really gets it. “You miss him, right? Your brother?”

She looks down and fidgets with the cuff of her jacket. “I don’t think about him. Not anymore. Bad things happen if—” In the corner of the room, a chair collapses in on itself. The walls rumble and crack.

“Hey, hey, don’t. Hey, look at me.” She does, and he smiles at her. He really likes Wanda. Maybe he doesn’t know her very well, but he understands her, and she him. He takes her hand into his and squeezes it briefly before tapping his forehead again. “What’ll happen to him?”

“He’ll be gone completely, I think.”

“I’ll be fine then,” Bucky says. “He doesn’t deserve that. It’s just cruel.”

“Cruel,” she repeats.

“Yeah.” She’s folded her hands into his hands, and the way they’re clasped together, it almost looks like they’re praying. “I’m not going to remember this, am I?”

She shifts and looks down and away. “I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Bucky says. “I’m used to it. Better me than St—someone else. At least I know how to handle gaps in my memory.”

She brushes her fingers against his temples.

 

* * *

“You should give that memory back,” Steve says.

Wanda tilts her head at him. Strangely, she looks surprised. “I thought you would know what a dangerous thing a memory like that can be.”

“I think that’s up to Bucky to decide for himse—”

“It’s not about choice,” Wanda says. “He made his decision already. He chose the long, bitter road. He chose slowly clawing his way to some semblance of normalcy. And do you have any idea how much harder that is when the simple, painless route is always _there_ , goading you at every turn?”

“His memory’s already patchy as is, you didn’t have to take more from him.”

“I won’t apologize for refusing to subject him to this. This constant barrage of, if only you cared less, if only you didn’t have so many scruples, if only you weren’t so afraid of forgetting him. If only you gave in, then you wouldn’t have to suffer now. And you’re stuck in some low, dirty place, and all you can think about is how easy it would be to snip your mind into further pieces, so it would just stop _hurting_. It’s endless. It’s maddening.” There’s an ominous metal groaning, and she stops and closes her eyes briefly. “Can you blame me for not wanting to inflict that on anyone?”

There’s not much to say to that.

They’re quiet for a while longer, listening to the low constant rumble of the road going by under them. Wanda’s humming picks up in volume after a while, and Steve listens to that instead. The song is accompanied by the percussion and synthetic tones of modern music, but the rhythm itself is almost like that of a nursery rhyme. It’s a strange combination, but Wanda’s voice complements it well. The bizarre music, the streetlights, the late night haziness, Wanda—all of it has a sheen of surreality.

“I was at a college for a while,” Wanda says. “Someone my age loitering, doing nothing all day, that draws attention. I would walk around and wait for classes to start, then follow the crowd to those big lecture halls with hundreds of students in them.”

“No one looks twice at a kid in a campus full of them.”

“Right, exactly,” she says. “There was this girl named Kate. She liked archery, and she liked me. I sat next to her for a couple of weeks, and I guess, I just forgot for a while. I forgot that I’m not supposed to leave behind people who would notice when I’m gone.” She takes a breath and lets it shudder out of her. Her hands spasm in her lap, but there’s not a hint of red. “When it came time to move on, I had to—she looked at me, and she _smiled_.”

“Wanda—”

“And I thought maybe it would be okay if I let just this one person remember. Maybe one person in the entire world was allowed to know my face. I was going to let her remember. I was going to disappear and let her wonder what happened to Wanda from Psych 101. I walked away, and I was so scared. I’m not going back, Steve. I’m never going back. No one’s ever going to tie me up and strap a shock collar to my neck again.”

“ _Wanda_ , hey,” Steve says, pulling the car onto a shoulder on the side of the road. He reaches over and wraps Wanda’s hand into his own. She looks at him, her eyes large. “All things considered, you’re dealing with this a hell of a lot better than I did. When Bucky died, I destroyed a Nazi organization and then killed myself.”

Wanda cracks a smile. “I destroyed a robot army but didn’t quite succeed at the second part.”

“Well, neither did I.”

She lets herself smile for a little while longer before it drops off her face. “But Steve, you don’t get it. When I looked back, I saw Kate standing there with this blank expression. I didn’t mean to take it. I wasn’t supposed to touch her memories, but they were gone, and I’ve been so _careful_. I hadn’t slipped up once since Lagos, but it’s been getting so much harder. Like I’ve been losing control since Pietro—” She stops abruptly before pulling her hand out of Steve’s and beginning to unbuckle her seatbelt. “I should go.”

“Wanda, don’t.”

“We shouldn’t stay together for too long.”

“There’s no one around for miles.” She ignores him and fumbles for the door handle. “Wanda, we’re a long way from anything. Just stay for a few more hours.”

“Two people are more noticeable,” she says.

“More noticeable than a young woman alone in the middle of nowhere?”

She pauses, sighs and buckles her seatbelt.

“You can bail at the first sign of civilization,” Steve says as he swings the car back onto the highway.It’ll be a while before they hit anything remotely resembling a town. Steve settles back in his seat. The road is a straight shot all the way to the horizon. The radio is still singing in Sokovian, but the song and the voice is different this time. Something slow and bittersweet in a young man’s baritone. 

Wanda’s curled into a ball, her head pressed into the upholstery. Soft red light drips from her hands, pooling on the seat. It starts to build up until it’s spilling into the rest of the car, over the dashboard, onto the floor. Some strays points of light drift into Steve’s lap, and for a moment, he sees murky water. Pietro’s face, round and soft with childhood. Her home, her city flying in the sky. Soap bubbles. The crumbling facade of a building. Bucky’s hand in hers. Sleek metal. Red eyes. A young woman with dark hair and an impish smile.

“You don’t have to worry,” Steve says. “I won’t forget.”

Her voice is soft when she says, “That’s not how it works.”

 

* * *

It’s a long, lonely road winding up to the house. There’s nothing much for miles around, except the plains of yellowing grass. The trees on the property don’t belong to the area, so he spots those long before the house comes into view. He expects it to be changed somehow. The white-framed windows, the gabled roof, the blue detailing. There’s a layer of fine dust over everything. 

Bucky had scrawled a little landscape of trees and mountains in the dirt on the side of the house. He isn’t on the porch like he usually is. Steve finds him inside, dozing half-inside the refrigerator. His face is slack and open, and when he hears him walk into the kitchen, he opens his eyes and says, “It’s too fucking hot.”

“Hi,” Steve says.

“Thought you’d be back last week.”

“Sharon was on the other side of the country.”

“Or she was on this side, and she just wanted to fuck with you.”

Steve sighs. “I wouldn’t put it past her. It certainly makes it harder to track her down.”

Bucky swings to his feet and slopes off to the living room, leaving the refrigerator door to flap open. Steve bumps it closed with his hip and finds Bucky sitting upside down in his favorite armchair. He’s not smiling, but he’s still visibly happy. He spits a bit of hair out of his mouth and says, “So did you manage to work through your weird not-Peggy hangups?”

“I was surprised she didn’t punch me,” Steve says, settling on the couch. There’s a new dent on the far wall. Bucky must have been bored, he thinks.

“You like that in a gal,” he says.

“I do _not_.”

“The first time you saw Peggy, she knocked a guy’s lights out.”

“That’s no—” Steve starts to say before stopping. “Fair point.”

Bucky laughs and kicks his feet a little. His face has gotten a little red from all the blood rushing down into it. 

“So where’d she take you?”

“Arizona. I saw the Grand Canyon,” Steve says. “It was nice.”

“Anything interesting happen?”

“No,” he says. “The drive was long, boring. I saw a lot of corn.”

Bucky looks at him a little funny like his face is telling another story entirely. There really hadn’t been much. He spent a lot of time thinking about the radio and college lectures. He stared at those yellow streetlights so long, his eyes started to go funny and turned the lights different colors. After a while, they began to look a little red. 

Steve touches his face and finds that it’s all twisted up. His mouth is tensed, and his eyebrows are knotted together. There’s a tightness in his throat, and he can’t shake the strangest sense that he’s missing something vital. Like he broke a promise. He feels it building in his chest. Pressure with no release.

“Steve,” Bucky says, “what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

Bucky rolls out of his chair and kneels in front of him. He slowly raises his right hand and cups Steve’s cheek, brushing the corner of his eye with the pad of his thumb. Bucky’s hand is cool and dry. His calluses catch on Steve’s skin. “You’re crying,” he says.

Steve opens his mouth to reply, but now that the shaking’s started, it just won’t stop. He must make such a sight—a big man, reduced to tears over nothing at all. All it took to tip him over was the thought of long nights on the road and a half-remembered melody from the radio. He ducks his head down, hiding his face from view. Bucky’s hand slides carefully from his cheek to the back of his neck. It’s a firm weight, coaxing Steve forward until he’s leaning into Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky is warm and solid in a way that Steve hadn’t known that he missed. His hand strokes the hairs on the back of his neck. He smells like cheap soap, furniture polish, lemon window-washing solution. “You’ve been cleaning,” Steve says.

“Hm?”

Steve turns his head a little so his mouth is free and his nose is pressed into the side of Bucky’s neck. “You missed me.”

“What makes you say that?” Bucky asks. Steve can feel his voice rumbling in his chest.

“You cleaned.”

He can hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe I did. Just a little.”

“Miss me?”

“I cleaned, you jackass,” Bucky says. “I didn’t miss you at all.”

Steve draws back to direct a glare at him. His mouth is slanted in a funny, little smile, and his hand slides down to rub soothing circles into Steve’s shoulder. “You’re such an asshole,” he tells Bucky.

He hooks his arm around Steve’s torso and stands, pulling them both to their feet. If he had both arms, Steve thinks, Bucky would just pick him up. But he still hasn’t quite figured out the trick to that yet. They make do. He shuffles Steve to the bathroom and untangles himself before shutting the door. “Take a bath,” Bucky says. “There’re sandwiches in the fridge. Get some sleep. I don’t know what I’d do with you if you keeled over.”

Steve snorts and begins to peel off his shirt. “You sound like my ma,” he says, and then, quieter, “Thanks, Buck.”


	4. Chapter 4

His eyes are tacky when he wakes up, and it takes a long time for him to orient himself. He’s in his own bed. He’s home. Well, the closest thing he has to it now. Steve pushes himself up on his elbows. The light filtering in through the window slats is thin and grey. Dusk or early morning. Maybe cloud cover, but this deep into summer, who is he kidding?

Bucky’s at the dining table with a hand towel in his hand. He’s got all sorts of odds and ends spread out in front of him. A little basin of water, a large sponge, a clay bar, a couple bottles, small containers, and the black cover for his left arm. Steve looks away. It’s always a bit of a gut punch to see the metal and wires exposed like this. Bucky looks up when Steve shuffles to a stop at the entryway. “When’s the last time you slept?” he asks.

“Not long ago.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow and drops the hand towel on the table. “Steve, you were dead on your feet when you came in yesterday, then you crashed for almost twenty hours,” he says. “I’m asking again, Steve. When was the last time you slept?”

Steve leans over to see outside through the open front door. The plains and the trees look oddly flattened in the low light, and the last red vestiges of the sun recedes west. So it really is evening. And the last time he slept—well, the drive home is just one blurry haze, but he doesn’t recall anything resembling sleep there. Before that he was in Flagstaff with a tail on him, and the deadline Sharon had set for him to get to Arizona had been a bit short.

“Before I left?” Steve finally says.

“You gotta be fucking kidding.”

Steve slides into one of the dining chairs next to Bucky and waits for a rebuke that never comes. When he looks over, he sees Bucky slump back in his chair and heave a resigned sigh. He picks up the hand towel and begins rubbing it over what remains of his left arm. Now that he’s looking, there’s a pale residue on the metal that Bucky is carefully buffing away.

“Is that carnauba wax?” Steve takes a closer look at the assorted collection on the dining table and picks up a bottle. “You’re using car washing soap on your _arm_?”

Bucky shrugs. “Eh, it works on cars. My arm’s not much different.”

“Isn’t there something better?”

“Hey, it works. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it doesn’t draw attention when Natasha has to go out and resupply.” He waves the hand towel at Steve for emphasis before going back to tending to his arm. 

There’s a methodical way he goes about it, working on each plate slowly, making sure not to let the terry cloth catch on any jagged metal edges. It makes him oddly vulnerable—human. Bucky sitting here, quietly, carefully taking care of himself with the air of well-worn routine, and Steve hadn’t noticed just how much of himself Bucky had hidden away. This is the smallest of glimpses. It’s enough for Steve to realize that he doesn’t really know this older, jaded Bucky at all.

This man carries with him the weight of several lifetimes and bears himself as an old veteran does. A little closed-off, plenty bitter, but mostly he’s just tired. With the relentlessness and frenetic energy of the new century, Steve has always felt just a little bit old. But here next to Bucky, he feels impossibly young. He looks at the fine lines on Bucky’s face, the scar tissue on his hands, the space where his left arm used to be.

“—Steve.” Bucky’s voice cuts through the quiet. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

He’d caught bits and pieces. Natasha dropped by to resupply them a few days back, so there’s still fresh fruit in the fridge. A couple of teenagers from the next town over have been sniffing around the edges of the property. This season is the hottest it’s been in decades. 

“Apricots. You could see the lit-up cigarette tips from the kitchen window. Global warming.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, sounding just a bit surprised. “All the ice melting in the world, and we’d never be cold again.”

Steve nods absently, looking past Bucky’s shoulder out the window. The wind is kicking up dust, drawing red patterns in the air. It twists ever higher. Lurid color against a bleached sky. He can feel the heat settle, curling into the corners of the house. 

 

* * *

It is as Steve leans forward to squint thoughtfully at the new dent in the living room wall that he sees the painting. It’s nestled in the organized clutter surrounding their bookcase. The long days make hungry readers of the both of them, and they’ve long since overwhelmed their bookcase’s capacity to house everything. Most of their books make do with being stacked on the floor. But even amidst the chaos, the painting is obvious if one looks, and he’s most certainly looking. He can’t do anything but look.

There has always been a nervous quality to Bucky’s art. Even the portraits of the girls have that strange tension lingering at the peripheries. They are beautiful and composed, but there’s always an underpinning of sorrow in their expressions. Somehow, this painting brings all that frenetic anxiety to the fore.

Most of the canvas has been painted black, save a window in the center where a man’s face looks out at him. His face is a patchwork of blues and greens and whites with orange in the hollows of his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, just above his right brow. He is in his fifties perhaps, with black hair neatly combed back and a brown suit. He is aged by a pursed mouth and a heavy brow, but it’s the eyes that are the most striking. They are set deep into his face, a dark shadow cast over them. The red rimming his eyes are a vibrant crimson, the brightest slash of color in the entire painting. 

Steve has never seen this man in his life. 

The way people used to be, the way they used to live, everyone knew everyone on the same block as them. Maybe not the next block over, but they never had need to make the journey. Their entire world was one stretch of street and the buildings huddling around it. Steve knew everyone Bucky knew simply because he knew everyone who lived on their street. He has recognized every person in every portrait that Bucky has ever painted. Except this one.

The brushstrokes are messy and rushed, even for Bucky. The border of black crowds the man’s face, barely leaving enough room for his right ear to fit the frame. The man’s expression is exhausted, but Steve imagines that he can see a hint of grief underneath it all. Perhaps terror. There are spatters of dark red on his jaw and his left shoulder. 

Quietly, Steve turns away from the portrait and walks into the kitchen. He leans against the counter and breathes through his nose for a long while. Long enough for Bucky to finish whatever he was doing before and come back into the house. 

“You’re right,” Steve says, studying the cracks in the countertop. 

There’s a pause behind him that happens when Bucky is blinking very slowly. “Right about what?”

“Red. I don’t think I like the color at all.” Steve turns around to look at him. “It hurts a little to look at it.”

“Steve, are you okay?” Bucky is watching him, his eyes steady, his mouth set in a firm line. 

“Just a bit tired, I guess.”

 

* * *

Steve turns away and walks into the living room. Bucky is kneeling next to the dent in the wall, smoothing painter's putty over it. "I'd hoped you wouldn't come home till after I got this patched up," he says.

"You could've put one of your paintings over it, and I would never have known."

Bucky nods for a moment before squinting and asking, "Wait a fucking minute. Is that why you were always hanging all your drawings in weird places?"

" _No_."

"You _were_ , you bastard. I always wondered why you put Mr. Schmuel's face right under the window sill. What the hell did you do to it?"

Steve flushes a bit and manages to mumble out, "I just bumped it with my knee—"

Bucky's eyebrows shoot up. "You could barely throw a proper punch then. Damn, Rogers, you could've won so many more fights with your _knee_ if you could knock a hole clean through the fucking _wall._ "

"Shaddup, it was nearly rotted through."

"Man, instead of 'Sock Ol' Adolf in the jaw,' your catchphrase should've been, 'Knee Ol' Adolf in the—"

"I'm sure the war bond folks would've _loved_ that."

"I would've bought your bond," he says. "You could've made millions."

"I'll keep that in mind next time I go on USO tour," Steve says dryly, and Bucky snorts.

"Well I'm glad _that_ mystery's finally solved after eighty fucking years."

"Hey, you never asked."

"I was respecting your creative license as an artist. Maybe Mr. Schmuel's sour, wrinkled face added _atmosphere_ or something, I wasn't gonna challenge the resident expert. I didn't think he was a goddamn _liar_."

" _You never asked_."

"Lies of omission, my friend," Bucky replies with an airy toss of his hand.

"Ask away then," Steve says. "Make an honest man of me."

"That's not how it works. It has to be offered—" Steve raises an eyebrow at him. "Fine." He casts his eyes about the room momentarily, at the disaster zone of a bookcase, at the dent in the wall, the couches, his drying paintings, the rocks Steve picks up on walks sometimes. He turns back to Steve. “You haven’t painted in a while.”

Steve goes still for a long time. 

"That's not a question," he finally says.

And Bucky just gives him a look. His gaze is level, undemanding, sympathetic even. As if he _knows._ As if the answer is already in his head, and he's simply waiting for Steve to say it out loud. "Lies of omission," he repeats.

He looks away from Bucky, breathing deeply through his nose. "The Steve Rogers who painted then," he says, "he's a different guy from the me now." It is a pitifully inadequate answer, but he knows that Bucky has always been charitable when it came to these things. 

"You think you left a part of you behind in 1945."

"Hell, Bucky, I think I forgot to bring all the pieces of Steve Rogers with me when I left for Europe."

"Like forgetting to pack your skivvies before going on a long trip," Bucky says.

Steve cracks a smile. "Yeah. Exactly."

Bucky nods. "I get that. Being afraid to check to see what's missing."

"I know what's missing."

"No, you don't," Bucky says. "Otherwise, you'd be painting."

"What if—"

"Steve, if you were the kind of artist who stopped after times got tough, then I guess I've been wrong about you this whole time. You never stopped with anything else. Why this? Why now?"

"Bucky."

They look at each other. There's a bright, almost feverish light in Bucky's eyes. He's leaning forward, almost entirely into Steve's space, his hands spread beseechingly, in supplication. It strikes Steve in this instant that they are at a crucial juncture. That the point Bucky is trying to drive home is somehow deeply important to him, even if neither of them can fully articulate it. _I've been here. I've seen this. Please, don't deny me this._

Bucky says, very quietly, "It's okay to admit you're afraid of what you'll find if you start looking. But you gotta start."

"Okay," Steve says. "Yeah, okay."

 

* * *

It's much harder to pick up the second time around. The painting of the red dust cloud sits in his room, almost complete but not quite. And after that one, he'd just—stalled. He stares at the red bleeding over blue, tan grass and a bleached sun, and he realizes that maybe he's looking at the wrong painting.

He steps out of his room and walks around, looking for Bucky's paintings. He'd notice them before, but it was always inadvertent—in the same way he notices a new sound. Barely there until his head is angled just right, and it finally catches his notice. And then it becomes a part of the ambient clutter again. This time, he's really looking.

He sees no other paintings like the man in blue, but he gets the distinct sense that they're there—just hidden. Even the man in blue disappeared from the living room after Steve's first glimpse of it. Instead, the house is populated with images of the past—portraits of neighbors and relatives. 

Steve gets caught in the hallway, staring at a painting perched high on top of the kitchen cupboards. It is Howard and Peggy beside each other talking, their hands raised in gesture. The background is a sea of oranges and yellows and greens with a bit of red bleeding into Howard's suit and left hand. He is leaning forward, and Peggy is leaning back in her chair, her dress the only splash of purple on the canvas.

It's odd because Bucky paints Peggy in a way he doesn't any other woman he has before. Her features are vague where the others were rendered in sharp relief. There is a knot in her brow, and her mouth is a firm, unhappy line. It is not how Steve would have painted her. He would have painted her with her chin tipped up, mouth quirked with pride, clean lines, blazing and confident in every stroke. 

Peggy as Steve knew her has never wavered, never doubted, but Bucky's Peggy is hazy and pensive as he has never known her to be. And he wonders what Bucky has seen of her, what face she has shown him that she kept shuttered from Steve. They must have been wary of each other, both invested in Steve but not enough to blindly trust every one of his confidants. He imagines them together—the sniper's stillness and the tactician's reserve. Perhaps they grew to respect each other in time.

Steve walks into the kitchen and takes the painting down from its high resting place. Up close, he can see that Bucky had scratched lines into the paint with his fingernails. Arcs bursting out from points like primeval suns, rows of lines radiating out from their backs, their hands. He can see that Peggy's hands are not raised in gesture but rather she is holding something close to her chest. Intimate like one would a baby, but the form is too indistinct to tell what exactly it is she's carrying.

Steve carries it out to the porch, leans it against the railing. He retreats back into the house momentarily to retrieve the various painting supplies from the shelf they set up by the front door. He uses the pre-stretched, pre-primed canvas, the brushes are synthetic fibers. When he was a younger man, he would stretch and prime the canvas himself, but perhaps this is what he needs. Different approaches in different times.

He could paint her like he always imagined he would. He could make her resplendent, proud. He could make her perfect. Steve looks again at Bucky's vision of Peggy—solemn, watchful, uneasy, her hands tucked close to her chest. Steve's portrait of her would be an honest one, but so is Bucky's. He could paint her face differently over and over, and he would capture maybe one aspect of her each time, but never the whole of her. 

He doesn't want to simply paint a portrait of Peggy, Steve realizes. He wants to paint a portrait of her that extends beyond the physical dimensions of her face. He wants to somehow capture the nature of the self. One that is sharp and luminous and apprehensive and uncertain and well, multi-faceted. 

That's what he imagines it would be. Like looking at Peggy through a shattered piece of glass where the physical is refracted to the point that it begins to disintegrate, giving way to the indescribable, the intangible. Steve takes a breath. 

He can paint this.

Steve begins to sketch her in, conscious of the geometry of her features. He has always painted things structural and sharp—now he's simply taking that a step further than he's ever gone before. The edges of her body and the background begin to splinter off until they're indistinguishable from each other. The impression of a pressed collar here, the gleam of a button, the seam of her uniform there. She is suspended in time—her surroundings a mass of black and grey shards, catching light; her face ageless, simultaneously young and old, impossibly so. 

This can barely be considered a portrait by traditional definitions, but he supposes there's nothing wrong with that. Different approaches in different times. Some part of him balks at the prospect of abandoning the traditional rules in favor of something strange and new—in favor of something that is perhaps more honest. He had always structured his art around the specific challenges and restrictions of representing the world strictly as his eyes see it, and it has always served him well. 

But here, when faithful representation stifles, there is little recourse but to move past it. He can feel the old rigidities begin to break down—he is reinventing his conception of art as he goes along. It's liberating; it's terrifying. He feels breathless with it. 

He pauses and steps back. The sun has already sunk below the horizon, and he has yet to even touch his paints. It's a map of straight lines and angles, clustered towards the center dispersing out as they near the edges of the canvas. You couldn't find a face in this no matter how hard you tried, but he can see her in his mind's eye already. And she is glorious.

There's a creak when the front door opens and shuts behind him, and Bucky is hooking his right hand gently into his. His chest is pressed into Steve's back, and he can feel the warmth radiating off him. The musk of sweat. It must've been hotter inside the house than the outside. "C'mon," Bucky murmurs into his ear. "Get some sleep, Stevie."

"Bucky," Steve says.

"It's okay, it's okay. I'll clean up for you."

"'M alright."

"Just a few hours," Bucky says. "Peggy will wait for you. She won't begrudge you a moment of rest."

Steve stares at Bucky's Peggy, still propped up against the porch railing. He nods, and Bucky squeezes his hand before releasing it. Steve shuffles back into the house, pauses at his bedroom door to look down the hallway out the open front door. There is Bucky, silhouetted in the porch light. He is sitting on his haunches, his hand following the sketched-in lines of Peggy, ever so careful, making sure that his hand never touches the lines themselves. He tips his head forward until the ends of his hair just barely brush the canvas. It's a strangely intimate portrait in itself. 

 

* * *

Sleep comes fitfully. In the last hours before morning, he watches the eastern sky for the first hints of sunrise. Bucky sleeping in the next room—a light sigh, the rustle of bedsheets. He doesn't know if it's his mind conjuring sound where there is only quiet, but it is comforting nonetheless.

Morning finally comes, and he is standing in front of their little paint cabinet. Bucky had left the canvas by the door. He takes a breath and looks at the neat rows of paint. There are little labels on each tube with Bucky's scrawl. VanDyke brown. Dot's hair. Burnt sienna. Mr. Fieseler's desk. Sap green. An Austrian forest in midday. Cadmium red. Emblem red lipstick. They're not ordered by color or by any logic if you didn't know Bucky. The paints are grouped by texture. Thick paints, runny ones, smooth textures like cream. 

Steve turns away from the brighter colors and fixes his attention on the greys and blacks, the browns, the flesh tones. Charcoal grey, raw and burnt umber, lamp black, titanium white, burnt sienna, yellow ochre.

He steps out onto the porch and quietly sets up. The morning chill dissipates quickly as the sun rises higher in the sky. It's easy to get lost in the lines carefully sketched onto the canvas, and he keeps looking until a face begins to form amidst the chaos. He imagines Peggy emerging, her surroundings built out of panes of black and brown-grey, the warmth of her face luminous against the gloom. 

He builds blacks into the darkest recesses of the painting. Light refracts off sharp edges. He paints her uniform with the same pallet as the background, constructing her body from the same materials as her surroundings. But still she is brighter than the rest. The planes of her clothing catches light or perhaps it's an internal brightness. He paints her face with a different pallet. Panels of skin forming the planes of her face with her high cheekbones, her nose, her full lips. 

It is undoubtedly Peggy. But the more you look at her, the more unstable this certainty becomes. The closer the inspection, the more she becomes a field of overlapping flesh-toned panes. Tans and browns and hints of red, subdued but more saturated than the rest of the painting. 

The sun burns low on the horizon, and sweat trickles down Steve's neck. The hum of cicadas is in the air. He notices, belatedly, how exhausted he is. Bucky is sitting in a chair pulled out from the living room. He's dozing with his arm slung over his stomach, twitching lightly in sleep. Steve smiles and rubs his thumb against Bucky's cheek. Bucky doesn't so much as stir at the touch which speaks volumes of how tired he is. 

Steve hooks an arm under Bucky's knees and one around his back. He carries him back into the house, down the hallway, through the open bedroom door. He deposits Bucky on top of the neatly made bed before quietly retreating to the living room.

 

* * *

Bucky wakes a few hours later and finds him sitting on the couch with his hands pressed into his knees. Steve knows that the tension is still apparent on his face, but he can do little to stop it. Bucky catches sight of it, sighs, and settles in his armchair.

"You saw it, huh?"

Steve pauses and doesn't ask, "Saw what?" It's the way Bucky holds himself—leaning away from the backrest of the chair, spine straight, his hands spread on his thighs. And he does know what Bucky's talking about, Steve thinks. It's impossible not to know. 

"Yeah," he says. "I did." 

It was a painting. One like the portrait of the man with bloodstains on his cheek. Blue and brown and blurry with the occasional spot rendered in surprising, exquisite detail. This one was leaning against the wall in Bucky’s room. It had been partially hidden from view by the curtains. Steve probably wasn’t supposed to see it, but he's never been able to leave well enough alone. 

A woman, standing with a ragged cloth cradled in her hands. The impression of a face twisted in a rictus of pain is imprinted on it with blood and dirt.

"I met her after a mission went to shit," Bucky says, his voice quiet, his head tilted in that way he does when he's settling in for a long story. "You don't know—God, you have no idea how bad those missions can get. I was all torn up. My legs couldn't go they were so shredded up. My right side was this mangled lump of flesh." 

"Hydra—they don't even have the decency to let you die properly. They just rebuild you from the bones up and tell you to keep going. Sometimes, you don't even have bones left. It really drives home what sadistic sons of bitches they were because they could've—Steve, they could've given me my left arm back if they wanted, but they _didn't._ Not because they couldn't; because they got a kick out of waking me up while they were sawing it off."

Bucky takes a long shaky breath. "Anyway, I was lying in the street, waiting for the handler to find me. I couldn't even crawl. And she _must've known_ when she saw me—what I did. She would've heard the bomb go off. And I was this monstrous thing, all chewed up, shrapnel sticking out of me, a gnarled mass of metal bolted to my shoulder."

"Then she—she took off her scarf. I remember thinking she was gonna strangle me with it, and I couldn't fight her off if she did. She wiped my face with it. I had so much shit caked on me—that scarf was ruined. Then she pulled me up, and she took me home. She washed off all the blood, the grime, the mud, the sweat. She dressed me in clean clothes, her son's clothes, and she laid me down in her own bed." Bucky falls silent and trains his eyes down, his shoulders hunching. 

"She was giving you a clean death," Steve says, his voice barely steady. "Wasn't she?"

Bucky shifts his gaze back up to his face, never quite meeting his eyes. It strikes Steve, suddenly, that they rarely actually _talk_. About what happened to Bucky, to himself, to the both of them. It's never been how they worked together, but now Steve can't help but wonder if they should've been better with this—candor. Because this is too enormous for any one man to bear alone, and Bucky can tell the story, but he will never share the burden, not with Steve, not with anyone. 

Steve can only sit and listen.

"Any normal man would've died from those wounds," Bucky continues. "It was reasonable of her to assume that I intended to die. Suicide bombings were just coming into fashion then." He bares his teeth in a smile. "She couldn't have known what I was. Functionally immortal."

"Even then, when I wasn't really anything but this _yearning_ that I could never quite—" Bucky pauses and tilts his head as if listening to a sound just out of earshot. His features smooth over into blankness. His breathing slows, and his eyes fix on a distant point over Steve's shoulder. The moment draws out like a thread pulling taut until it snaps, and Bucky is blinking and back in the present. "Well, it was the most like a person I felt in decades. A clean bed, a quiet house, fresh clothes, and the smell of something soapy—it's not such a bad way to die, you know."

"Yeah, I do," Steve says and thinks of Peggy. Maybe she wouldn't have envisioned that death for herself, but it's what she got in the end. Bucky nods, and Steve doesn't ask what happened to the woman. He can hazard a guess. 

 

* * *

Natasha is sitting in the hallway. Shoulders bowed forward, head rolled back to expose the lines of sweat down her neck and her forehead. She has always held herself like a coiled predator, still and silent but ever watchful. It's this strange languor that tips Steve off, even before he spots the first aid kit that's usually kept tucked in the linen closet. 

"Natasha," he says. Her eyes flick up to his face. The rest of her body doesn't so much as twitch, save the deliberate measured rise and fall of her chest. 

"Abdomen shot. Right side. Few inches above the pelvis. Nothing vital got hit. I'll be fine," she says between breaths. He kneels down beside her and inspects the hint of red seeping through the bandaging. She'd done a clean, professional job—never the type to crack under pressure. Natasha nudges him with her knee, and he meets her gaze again. "I just need a place to lay low. Only a few days. This was the closest safe house. I didn't come here to die, Steve."

"No," he says, "you didn't," and knows it to be true. 

Natasha wouldn't come here. She would find some quiet, secluded place to disappear. Perhaps she would plan it so that word would reach her friends, but to everyone else, she could very well still be alive. A ghost story. He wonders how much the myth of the Winter Soldier had affected her, rolling the bullet scar under her thumb, tracking down trails long since gone cold.

"She was a deactivated Red Room operative. One of the precursors to the Black Widow program. She started cropping up occasionally after the SHIELD's files went public. I kept track of her movements, but I wasn't watching closely. A lot of old faces were coming out of the woodwork, but it had more to do with their covers being blown than anything else. Most simply traveled around a bit to throw enemy operatives off their tracks before going back into hiding. So when this one disappeared, I figured she'd either died or gone to ground. I didn't investigate further."

Natasha smiles wryly. There's some blood smudged on the wall, Steve notes absently. "I didn't realize _she_ was hunting, and I didn't know she'd caught my scent until a slug from her rifle ripped through me."

"Natasha," Steve says.

"Don't make that face," she says, laughing lightly. "I was lucky. If it was anyone else, they would've killed me with the first shot. But that's not her style. She shoots to incapacitate, so she can—well, she likes to toy with her prey. I got out with a non-fatal wound and a compromised alias, so I did pretty well for myself." Natasha's brows furrow together, and she purses her lips. "It's a shame. That was one of my better aliases. It was a foreign informant for a Wakandan spy. No one thinks to look deeper when they think they know your biggest secret, and that identity was one of the few that gave me a plausible reason to travel regularly to Wakanda."

Steve laughs. "Are you—are you _pouting?_ "

Natasha arches an eyebrow at him. "It was a _very_ good alias."

"Alright, alright," he says, arching a brow right back. "Let's get you to sleep. It's pretty late."

Natasha says, "I can take the couch," but knows better than to protest when Steve picks her up and lays her on his own bed. Her head lolls to the side, and her gaze catches on Peggy's portrait, drying under the window. "Has Bucky seen this painting?"

Steve looks at her appraisingly then turns back to the portrait. For an instant, he can see the painting as she does. 

He'd painted Peggy _transcendent_. 

That fire he's always admired still burns within her, but here, she is at rest. With her eyes cast down and her mouth relaxed, she is a tranquil god. The sheer enormity of his respect for her, the depth of feeling, is nakedly apparent. Peggy, who he loved seventy years ago—that he would paint something this openly reverent now when he has begun to move on, the pain of her death faded into a yellowed bruise. 

"No," he finally says, his voice hoarse. "He hasn't."

"Don't show it to him." Natasha's gaze is steady, and she lifts her hand to brush against Steve's wrist. A point of contact. "You're a terrible liar." 

He pauses and looks at her for a long time. "What are you so afraid of?"

She smiles, small and dry. "If you paint her like _that_ , what do you think you'll expose when you paint Bucky?"

 

* * *

Natasha sleeps late into the afternoon, and Bucky has already started on dinner by the time she wakes. Steve is sitting in Bucky's favorite chair and smiles as he glowers at him from the stove. Natasha pads down the hallway, sleep tousled. She's barely awake enough to muster a nod to Steve before slipping into the kitchen. He watches as she greets Bucky. Then she presses her side into his as she peers into the pan he's fiddling with.

It's a lovely picture, Steve thinks. This instant of quiet companionship. 

"Is that supposed to be carbonara?" Natasha asks, deftly shattering the moment.

Steve can feel Bucky's frown even if his back is turned to him. "Yes." His frown deepens when Natasha arches a brow at him. "Since when have you been a food snob?"

"Snobbery has nothing to do with this. You don't put cream in carbonara."

"I've _watched_ you eat half-rotten meat."

"And I'll eat your pasta," Natasha says. "I just won't call it carbonara."

Steve doesn't quite manage to keep the snort of amusement from escaping. Bucky whirls on him. "The peanut gallery should keep his mouth shut."

"I didn't say anything," Steve replies, not even bothering to hide that he's laughing now.

"Be thankful I didn't say anything about the bacon," Natasha breaks in. "I could've mentioned the fact that you didn't use guanciale, but I'm being _nice._ "

"Please. The only time you're ever nice is when you're buttering someone up before you kill them. The day you're genuinely nice to me is the day I find a cozy bunker on the other side of the world to cower in."

"I'm nice," Natasha says. "Steve, tell him I'm nice."

"You're nice."

Natasha turns back to Bucky. "See? Terrible liar."

"Atrocious."

Steve rolls his eyes. "Go back to bickering over carbonara."

"It's _not_ carbonara," Natasha says.

"Says the expert."

Natasha narrows her eyes at Bucky. "I am, actually. Widely respected Eastern European food critic, Orsolya Lukacs."

"That alias is _Hungarian_."

"Any critic worth their salt knows what a basic _carbonara_ is, Barnes."

As entertained as he is, they can keep at this all night, and Steve is getting hungry. "Is this one of your aliases that lets you travel to Wakanda?" he cuts in before the bickering devolves any further. 

"Unfortunately, no. Wakandan cuisine is nonexistent outside the country, given that most of it is cooked with technologies they're pretending they don't have."

Bucky cocks his head. "You're in contact with T'challa? I thought you tazed him in the chest. Three times."

"I am, and I did."

Steve chuckles at Bucky's incredulous expression. "So how are you getting into Wakanda? It's not exactly an easy country to enter."

"Wakandan food may not be common internationally, but Wakandan art—that's been getting a bit of a renaissance recently."

"You're an art dealer," Steve says.

"One of the few in the world who can reliably acquire Wakandan art," Natasha replies with a slight smile.

" So that's how you've been getting us all those fancy art supplies. I thought it was strange that you could get us a trunk-load of professional oil paint but no high grade machine polish." Bucky walks into the living room with a plate piled high with carbonara-not-carbonara.

Natasha raises an eyebrow. "You're not bringing any out for the rest of us?"

"Bellyachers can get up and serve their own damn food."

"Hey! I didn't say anything about your pasta!" Steve protests.

"You didn't call it carbonara! You're siding with her!"

"I'm being _neutral_."

"Well, I'm not standing up to serve bellyachers or neutral parties." Bucky resolutely starts to dig into his food, and Steve and Natasha exchange amused glances before standing up. 

Neither Bucky nor Steve has ever been particularly good at cooking, but they've also never been picky about food. Steve starts in on his pasta with gusto. Natasha hides her smile in her napkin, but Bucky catches it anyway. "No dessert for you," he says, pointing at her with his fork. 

She tucks a hand under her chin. "Not even when I have a brand new set of watercolor paints for you to play around with?"

They stare each other down for a long while. It's enough time for Steve to finish his carbonara, decide that he really doesn't think cream or no cream makes a huge difference, and start to steal from Natasha's plate. Bucky heaves a sigh. "You can have Steve's dessert."

"Hey!"

Natasha jabs her fork between Steve's fingers and into the dining table. Bucky glares at her. "This is a nice table, and I'm not above eating two desserts tonight."

"And risk losing your girlish figure? I think not."

Later, Natasha slumps against the couch in defeat as Bucky smugly mops up crumbs from the bottom of a baking tin. "You win," she says. "I don't think I got a single grain of sugar. How can you even eat that quickly?"

"Spite," Steve replies, quietly mourning the loss of his chocolate bar cache, "and we grew up in the Depression."

"But mostly spite," Bucky says.


	5. Chapter 5

Sometime in the night a week after she arrived, Natasha disappears much the same way as she appeared—abruptly and without warning. Even the blood on the wall is scrubbed clean. Bucky squeezes Steve's shoulder as he stands in the hallway, staring at where the stains should be.

For once, he isn't sweating through his clothing. The heat is starting to give way to the next season. It's the last day of summer, Steve thinks.

"I've decided," he says, "that your pasta really was carbonara."

" _Thank you._ "

"I don't think the cream makes a difference. You cooked it with the eggs and you put the ham into it. I'd say that makes a carbonara."

"Now if only you said that when Natasha was still around," Bucky says, pointing a finger at Steve. "I could've won that argument."

"Maybe I shouldn't take your side."

Bucky frowns. "What? Why?"

"You ate all my chocolate," Steve says. 

"I didn't."

"It's all gone."

Bucky huffs. "Stop being so dramatic. I didn't touch the stockpile behind your wardrobe."

"I don't have one there."

"Don't be ridiculous," Bucky says, turning on his heel. "I know the sound the strongbox makes when you unlock it. You added more sweets to it the night Natasha came over."

It takes Steve a few seconds too many for the words to sink in. Then he's whirling to see Bucky's back vanish into the bedroom. "Bucky—"

"You really need to hide this better," Bucky calls through the doorway. "Everyone looks for hidden panels in the furniture first. And you use the same lock combination for everyth—" A distinct click, and his voice stops abruptly.

A shot of cold bolts through his veins. Steve steps into the bedroom and looks at Bucky, who has gone very, very still. His back is turned to him, but Steve can still read every nuance of emotion in the bunching of muscles in his shoulders, his spine curling in, the sudden straightening of his neck. He can't see the contents of the strongbox from here, but he doesn't need to.

"Bucky…" Steve repeats. 

"I had—" Bucky clears his throat, "I'd wondered what happened to this."

Natasha was afraid, he thinks. "I didn't want you to see," he says.

Bucky turns his head to look at Steve long enough for him to see his furrowed brow, and then he's looking away, his gaze irresistibly pulled back to the painting. "You still love her."

"Yes."

Bucky is quiet for a long time. Even now, he is careful to hold the painting at its edges, afraid of smudging the still drying oil. Steve half-wishes that he would do something, shout, tear down the walls, drive his fist through the canvas. Instead, he leans the painting against the wall. Gingerly, like he would handle spun glass or a live snake.

The silence stretches between them, and Steve begins to count the time to the beating of his heart. It's a trick he learned while crouched in a shallow dugout for hours on end, a Hydra platoon patrolling right on top of him, unable to so much as twitch for fear of alerting them. His heart rate never strayed from its rhythm not even when he was fighting—another effect of the serum. The steadiness of it always seemed to calm him down.

"Would you—?" Bucky asks and doesn't finish the question.

He already has. He always will. He's painted him broad-shouldered and glistening and sharp-jawed and masculine and transcendentally beautiful. Steve's painted him like this since the moment he looked up on a 1934 spring morning and saw Bucky sitting on the floor, tugging the last loop of his tie down to lie flat on his chest. The answer is plain on his face, he knows.

Bucky's mouth tightens. “I was the one who—" he coughs. His fist is clenched on his knee. "I remember a dog. The handler told him, me, the Soldier—Jesus, I don’t even know—to shoot the fucking thing. And he—I didn’t want to. I didn’t shoot the dog. I shot up a bus full of kids once, but I couldn’t shoot a fucking dog of all things.”

“Bucky—”

"I killed you too. After you were dead, you kept coming back to life, and I killed you over and over in new fucked up ways. I don't know if it was my brain doing that or if it was them, and I don't know which would be worse.Because if it was all me, what the hell does that say about who I am? Bu—but if it was them, that meant they _knew_. But regardless, I killed you."

"You didn't when it counted," Steve says.

"Oh, sure. I didn't. Doesn't mean I won't eventually. Doesn't mean I didn't a thousand times before. It's not guilt," Bucky says, his face grim. "I'll be paying reparations for a long, long time, but I don't got room for guilt. They rooted that out of me somewhere near the two-hundredth wipe, but it's okay. It was actually kinda nice of them. A long life and an inability to be crippled by remorse—it makes for an efficient killer, but if they didn't, I wouldn't be able to move forward and make amends."

He wheezes out a short laugh and teeters around until he's standing next to Steve, his one good hand gripping the hem of his shirt. His expression is awful. "And you'd still—you would paint me like this still. Like I'm what? A god? Like I would ever be at peace after everything that happened. And it's nice. It's a really fucking nice thought, but that's not how this shit works. And you love me, yeah?"

"I do," Steve manages to croak out.

“You came to find me—after the bomb went off,” Bucky continues.

“Yeah.”

“Why?"

“Your face showed up on the security footage. I wanted to see if it was really you.”

“And if it was? If it really was me?”

Steve pauses, swallows.

“Would you have stopped me?” Bucky’s voice is beseeching, his hand spread in supplication. 

“Yes.”

Bucky smiles, baring teeth. “Liar.”

“If you were a threat, I would.”

“Then why didn’t you? You didn’t know about the trigger words.” The fabric of Steve's shirt gripped in Bucky's hand starts to tear. His knuckles are stark under his skin. “You shouldn’t have pulled me out of the river. If you were really going to stop me, you would’ve let me drown.”

“I didn’t know about the trigger words, but I knew Zemo did something.”

“But did you know I would snap out of it? I’d gone psychotic. You didn’t know I wouldn’t keep going until someone finally killed me.”

“Bucky—”

“You should’ve let me drown.”

“You didn’t,” Steve says, quiet. “You were half out of your mind, and still you dove in after me. Who would I be if I just left you?”

“Steve,” Bucky says. He forces his hand to unfold and rests it on Steve's chest, palm up. “You need to be honest with me. If you really had to, if I was too far gone to be worth saving, would you put me down?”

“I—”

“If you lie to me, I swear to god I’m walking out of here.”

He imagines Bucky standing before him, cold and terrifying, and Steve putting him down like a feral dog. Bucky’s eyes alight with animal desperation. Bucky’s face cradled in his hands, his mouth twisted in a snarl—a twist, a snap. His limbs sodden, his lungs filled with water, his mouth cool and damp to the touch. The two of them wrapped around each other in some farce of an embrace, his elbow against Bucky’s neck, Bucky slackening in his arms. Steve’s fingers digging into his chest, parting skin, parting muscle and viscera and bone until he has a hold of Bucky’s heart. He knows he’s strong enough to do it—to crumple a person like a paper doll in his hand.

He’d been so goddamn confident when he told Sharon he’d take Bucky down, but who was he kidding? He hadn’t brought a gun with him then. Not even a knife. He can’t even bring himself to imagine what it would be like to feel Bucky shuddering against him, feel the death throes, feel his last breath. 

“I would,” he says. 

Bucky closes his eyes and exhales. “You’re a goddamned fool, Rogers," he says before walking out the door.

 

* * *

Steve doesn't follow him out. He listens to the sound of the old car's engine kick up, dirt crunching under tires. He's never heard the sound of the car leaving from inside the house. He's heard Natasha's eclectic collection of somewhat dishonestly acquired vehicles, but before this moment, he's never heard this particular combination of sputtering and grinding fade into the distance. He lets out a breath and gulps it back in and in and in.

A panic attack, Steve thinks, is a lot like a fit of asthma.

He presses his cheek into the cool wood of the floor and stares up at Peggy's face, peering back down at him. Her expression is inscrutable, and the light shining on her seems so very cold all of a sudden. She watches him silently as he curls in on himself. He wishes he hadn't painted her so aloof.

 

* * *

Eventually, he has to pick himself up off the ground. 

Eventually, he makes his way to the living room and stares at the partially finished portrait of Natasha done in red and purple and yellow watercolors. He veers into the kitchen and reaches up to take down the painting of Howard and Peggy perched on top of the refrigerator. Then he retrieves Dot and Helene from their places in the living room. There are several other pieces painted from memory scattered around the house. 

Then Steve slips into Bucky's bedroom, pausing in the doorway. He rarely came in here, and even when he did, he never allowed himself to linger. By unspoken agreement, Bucky's bedroom has always been a sanctuary. Privacy is impossibly precious after seventy-years of being denied even the basest of dignities.

He allows himself to look now. Because there must have been some _sign_ that he missed—something that Natasha had seen and grown wary of, but Steve had been too wrapped up in himself to even notice. Bucky has the bed shoved against the far wall, away from the gauzy-curtained window, and he’d moved one of the chairs into a spot with sight lines to the front door. 

There are no paintings left lying around like the last time Steve had been in here. He pokes around the various hidden nooks and doesn't find the portrait of the woman who picked Bucky up from the side of the road. No sign of the blue man with blood splattered on his clothes. 

He finds a child holding a cob of partially-husked corn standing in a murky field. Her features are too indistinct to be recognizable, and her clothes are a shapeless blob on her body. But the corn is painted in sharp, confident brushstrokes. It draws the eye to it—the vivid colors and crisp detail. He can see the fraying edges of the dried husk, the orangey kernels, the bits of moisture gleaming in the sunlight. It distracts you from the child holding it, the field she’s standing in, the blurred gleam of a metallic something in the corner of the frame.

It’s an odd and terrifying painting. 

Steve takes it to the living room and deposits it gingerly on top of the dining table with the rest of Bucky's paintings. He returns to the bedroom, forcing his hands to remain steady. 

The interior is cold and impersonal without Bucky here to fill it. Steve resists the urge to drop on top of the bed and breathe in any lingering scent. The sheets are fresh, but even if they weren't, there would be nothing. Steve noticed months ago that Bucky's skin had become abnormally odorless. The sweat and stink and musk of his youth now rendered sterile. 

He's found a lot fewer paintings than he expected to. Steve mentally runs through all the hidden places in the house. He has one left, he realizes. There’s a panel in the wall behind the headboard stocked. It was likely stocked with firearms within easy reach of the bed. Steve's never seen it before, but the dimensions of the house imply that _something_ is there. 

He slides his hand along the frame of the bed until his fingers snag on the catch. Some silent mechanism slides most of the wall back and away. It's not something that Natasha could have jury rigged with the limited time and resources that they have. The technology involved is too sleek and sophisticated, and Steve realizes that this safe house must have been one of SHIELD's before its collapse. 

It's a surprisingly large space, but there is only a single painting in it. An enormous one, easily spanning the entire wall of the bedroom. The strokes are broad and sweeping, painted with the same blues, greens, and points of red as the other paintings about Bucky's time with Hydra. But this painting is different, somehow. It's—softer, more intimate, almost dream-like. 

It's the first time Bucky's ever painted Steve.

The two of them are nestled together, their legs tangled together, Steve's cheek pressed into Bucky's shoulder. They lie amidst a roiling storm, and Steve is sleeping. His face is peaceful, seemingly unaware of the turmoil churning around him. He is a bright point of light in the center of the painting, whites and pale blues and yellows. The lines describing his features are gentler and finer than the bold black brushstrokes of the rest of the composition.

Steve catches his breath when he turns his eyes on Bucky. He had painted himself _whole_. Both of his hands are clenched together on his stomach, the knuckles and joints a stark mapwork of black lines—knobbly, imperfect, undeniably flesh. No, it's not just that Bucky painted himself with both hands, he painted himself as he was in 1943. His hair is cropped neatly and styled with pomade, and there's a slight crook in his nose that Hydra had corrected long ago. 

But Bucky is thin, almost emaciated. His skin sags where fat and muscle once filled them, and his eyes stand out dark against the gauntness of his face. He lies awake, staring above the scene. His mouth is tense with worry. Next to Steve, he looks like a man slowly wasting to his death. 

Steve sits down hard on the edge of the bed. It's neatly made in a way that it never has been—Bucky doesn't agree with tidiness for its own sake. He only cleans when it's necessary or to prove a point, and Steve wonders if leaving had been Bucky's intention from the start. He looks back up at the painting. The storm raging around them, Bucky steadily waning, and Steve sleeps on. His hand is wrapped around Bucky's shoulder, unwilling to let go even in the depths of unconsciousness.

 

* * *

It's a long walk from the house to the nearest town. Longer still from there to anything remotely resembling a city. Steve makes the trip anyway, stopping by a sealed garage some miles from the safe house to pick up one of Natasha's cars. He has no clear idea of where to go or where to even start looking. He can barely even hold any certainties in his mind, let alone something as complex as a _concrete destination_. But he takes the keys anyway, duct taped to the bottom of the car behind the back left tire. 

He drives east, drawn as he always is towards home. He knows better than to look for Bucky in New York—it would never be that easy—but it's a direction. It's a start. 

And it's just as he's about to hit the city limits that he figures out where he's going. He swings around and circumvents New York entirely. The skyline passes by. The last time he and Bucky were in this city together, they were mad men, the both of them. When they walked the streets, watching the skeletons of skyscrapers rise. Piling higher and higher until the sun was blotted out entirely.

He finds Tony in a small suburban home in Massachusetts. No one answers the door when he knocks. A skittish intern in the new Avengers HQ had scrawled out the address and said, “He’s usually there on Thursdays.” From inside, he can hear Tony’s voice—disjointed, pitched to carry, as it always is—and a woman’s voice—quieter, muffled. Tony is asking the woman if she would like coffee. Steve knocks again. Louder this time.

The woman who answers the door is in her fifties. Her clothing is neutrally colored, comfortable, and sensible. There are deep lines around her mouth. He finds himself strangely unnerved by her. 

She doesn’t look surprised that Steve is here. “I’m assuming you’re here for him,” she says. 

The house is decorated to suit the woman—modest and practical. There are a couple of old trophies and other knick knacks to indicate that a child grew up here once. The living room is comfortably furnished with mismatched couches and a coffee table. Steve pauses to get a look at the collection of photos in various frames on the mantel. Before he can get a good look at them, Tony comes out of the kitchen with two steaming mugs in his hands. He blinks, and Steve realizes that he doesn’t know why exactly he came.

“Stark,” he says blandly.

Tony replies with an equally neutral, “Rogers,” before offering one of the mugs to the woman. 

She accepts it with a wrinkled nose. “I don’t know why I bother. Your coffee’s terrible.” The woman settles on the couch and takes a sip. 

Steve and Tony remain standing, eyeing each other warily. This is neutral territory for the both of them. Not the Tower or Avengers headquarters or Steve’s apartment. This is another person’s home, and neither of them can start a fight here. The woman watches both of them, and Steve feels oddly ruffled. It’s the way she looks at them, he realizes. Neutral but with a hint of bitterness.

“How’ve you been, Tony?” Steve finally says. 

“Good,” he replies. “Headquarters has been quiet, but who cares. You got what you wanted.”

“I didn’t come here for a fight.”

Tony wilts a little, and he goes back to looking small, tired. Steve had always thought that fighting the Chitauri had taken something vital out of him. Ever since New York, Tony carried a tension with him that never quite went away. He’s always been somewhat frenetic, but now it has a certain neurotic edge. It makes him wonder what it had been like flying up into that gaping maw in the sky, feeling the circuits in his suit stutter and fail--falling to his death. He’d left a little of himself behind then.

The room is silent except for a quiet rustling as the woman shifts comfortably and sets her mug down. 

“Well,” she says to Steve, “I assume you’re here for a reason.”

“I—” Steve says. He glances away. One of the pictures on the mantel is of a kid in his early twenties. He’s smiling and looking at something just out of the frame. Something clicks into place in his head. Steve looks back at the woman. “I’m here to make amends.”

“What a coincidence,” Mrs. Spencer says, “That’s why he’s here as well.”

“Your son,” Steve says. “What was he like?”

She sends him a sharp look, and he can see Tony flinch minutely in his peripheries. He wonders how Tony had spent so long here trying to make things right without once mentioning Charlie Spencer.

“We had less than most, but he was also more reliable than most. We depended on each other.” Her voice is clipped and stripped of emotion. 

“So he was a good man.”

“I couldn’t have been prouder.” She levels him a cutting look. “Would you have cared less if he hadn’t been clean or upstanding or respectable?”

“No, of course not—”

“Captain, families like us, we watch our boys walk out the door knowing that they may never come back. The first time I let myself relax was when he went off to Sokovia where the prejudice isn’t quite so—institutional.” Mrs. Spencer barks out a short laugh and says, “More fool me.”

It is here that Tony steps in. He sends a quick warning look at Steve before turning to Mrs. Spencer and asking, “Would you like some more coffee?”

“Why would I drink your horrible coffee,” Mrs. Spencer mutters as she hands her empty mug to Tony. He retreats into the kitchen to refill it. Steve’s never seen him this way before—quiet and pensive. His actions are carefully considered and cautious. The incongruity itches, but Steve supposes it makes sense. 

He thinks of Zemo, his quiet desperation. We drove him to this. He looks at Mrs. Spencer and wonders if she too has been driven as far as Zemo had before he snapped. The little twitches and gestures of Zemo’s hands suggested nothing more vicious than an affable but restless demeanor. You wouldn’t think he even had it in him to be vengeful. He looked like the kind of person who maybe had to take medicine for his anxiety. He looked like a salaryman. 

Steve comes back to himself when a mug is shoved unceremoniously into his hands. Tony is midway through some spiel about tweaking the coffee maker, and Mrs. Spencer leans back in her chair. The expression on her face retains its ever-present bitterness, but underneath it all is something almost—indulgent.

It’s strange that all of a sudden Tony has become better at rebuilding bridges than Steve. He’s either grown up a little or well, that might say some pretty ugly things about where Steve is at right now. The mug breaks in his hands, sending hot coffee and ceramic shards everywhere. 

“Jesus, I—” Steve says as he frantically tries to clean up the mess, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Spencer. I’m so sorry. I—”

“Stop apologizing,” Mrs. Spencer says. “It makes me feel sick.”

Tony studies Steve for a long moment. There’s a steadiness to him that is unexpected. “Maybe you should go,” he says.

“But—”

“We can talk. I know how to track down Natasha, and I know you keep in contact with her.” Tony takes a breath. “If we need to talk, we’ll talk.”

“Alright,” Steve says. He walks to the door, making sure that it doesn’t look like he’s bolting. 

There is no reason to hesitate at the threshold, but hesitate he does. For a moment, he considers turning back. He wants to ask Tony if Bucky had come to him for help. To carve out all the monsters in his head. Wasn't he working on some piece of tech that did that? Of all of them, Tony would be the one who wouldn't allow his better judgment to keep him from trying. More than that, however, he wants to ask Tony if there is a chance at peace between the two of them. 

Behind him, Tony’s voice is picking back up on its old spiel. It really is strange, Steve thinks, that he’s found this semblance of peace in the house of a woman who hates him. 

He straightens his spine and walks away.

 

* * *

Steve is halfway to Logan International Airport when Natasha calls. 

"You came into contact with Tony." Flat intonation. If she was happy about it, she'd pitch the end up to imitate a question. It's more friendly, even if she already knows the answer, so she usually makes the effort. But not now.

"Hi," Steve says.

"There are only a handful of people who have a personal vendetta against you. Deliberately seeking one of them out when you're supposed to be in _hiding_ is the pinnacle of idiocy, you know."

Steve takes a moment to think on that as he merges into the lane next to him. "Lots of people have vendettas against me."

"Most of those are just generalized senses of animosity directed at someone who they think should be doing a better job. It's not a vendetta, and it certainly isn't personal."

"Well, I wouldn't say that Tony has a vendetta. It's more like a grievance."

"A perfectly justified one."

"We just had a nice long conversation without trying to kill each other. Not even a little bit. I'd say we're starting to move past our differences."

" _Steve_."

He sighs. "Bucky left."

A pause before, "Did he—?"

"Yeah. He saw it."

She doesn't offer platitudes or apologies which Steve is grateful for. Natasha remains silent until she finishes integrating the new information. "You found the painting."

"You knew about it?"

"Don't make that face," she says, and Steve smooths down the frown that most definitely wasn't forming. He's not _predictable_. "I never saw it. It was only a suspicion until now."

"So Bucky leaving was your confirmation."

"No," Natasha says. "It was the fact that _you_ left. You would have been content to wait for Bucky. You would wait years if you had to—unless you had reason to believe that he wasn't coming back."

For a moment, the air is punched out of his lungs, and he narrowly avoids smashing into the car next to him. The steering wheel creaks as he slowly loosens his grip. "You know," Steve finally manages, "most people would find that habit of yours unsettling."

"And most people wouldn't approach known hostile elements in order to force their friends into contacting them."

"Would you have called me if I _hadn't_ talked to Tony?"

A short beat of silence. An eternity if you knew Natasha. "Point taken."

"I'll be at the airport in fifteen minutes."

Natasha sighs. "I'll be there in ten."

"Bring Bucky's paintings with you." It's not often that Steve gets to surprise her this many times in such a short window. He's honestly kind of enjoying himself. "Oh, come on," he says. "Half of his paintings are gone, and you're an art dealer. It's not hard to put two and two together."

"Sometimes I regret befriending the greatest tactical mind in US history."

"Never a dull moment."

"No," Natasha says dryly. "Definitely not."

Natasha raps on his passenger side window the moment he pulls in front of the international terminal. Steve slides out of the car, and then her hands are tugging him in by the collar of his jacket. He accepts the hug easily. She pushes herself up on her toes, presses her mouth next to his ear, and says, "This is a very stupid, reckless thing you're doing."

"Just another Tuesday then." He can feel her huff of annoyance against his neck. "So friend? Sibling?"

Natasha pulls back, arranging her face into a suitable imitation of excitement. "Fiancé," she says and flashes the slim band on her left hand at him. Her right hand slides into his front pocket.

"Right."

"Come on, we haven't booked tickets yet." 

Steve follows as she paces away. It'll be another few minutes before terminal security notices the abandoned car. "You know where Bucky is?"

"A suspicion," Natasha replies. "Lately, they're showing an uncanny propensity for being right."

The line is mercifully short. Only the last stragglers of the summer season are left, and it seems as if everyone has started to go back to their own lives. Natasha strides to the counter, her demeanor shifts with each step until she is another person entirely standing before the clerk. 

"Two tickets to Abuja," she says briskly. "Preferably the earliest flight available." She flicks out the necessary passports and cards onto the desk, and Steve suddenly notices that her nails are long and manicured.

The clerk flushes and scrambles. Natasha flashes a smile at her and thanks her graciously before towing Steve to the security line. 

"Nigeria?" he asks.

"Not our final stop, but there are no commercial flights to where we're going."

"Bucky's in _Wakanda_?" 

Natasha grimaces. "We are being discreet. At least try to make an effort at it."

Steve nods absently, a figure in the crowd catching his attention. For a moment, a hint of red starts to creep into the peripheries of his vision. "Have you heard from Wanda?"

Natasha arches an eyebrow at him. "She dropped off the map a long time ago. Steve, what are you—"

Steve turns his attention back to her. "Sorry, I just thought I saw someone I recognized."

Towards the front of the security line is a young woman, seemingly traveling by herself. Long black hair. An easy smile. The bearing of an affluent family's daughter, yet she also carries herself like a trained fighter. It's a striking combination, and for some strange reason, a familiar one. He's seen her face before, he just can't seem to remember where.

Natasha follows his sightline to the girl and stiffens at the sight of her. Her shoulders tighten, and her center of gravity drops just a little as her stance widens. She turns to him, keeping her face carefully angled away from the girl.

"What?" Steve asks in an undertone. 

"That—" Natasha says, "is a stray Clint picked up some time ago. Or maybe she was the one who adopted him, but that's not the point. What matters is that she knows my face, and she knows it well." The girl scans the crowd, and Natasha shifts her hair so it covers her profile. "She also doesn't know the definition of discreet."

They wait in tense silence as the girl finishes her survey of the line before turning, collecting her carry-on, and exiting the line. Natasha releases the tension in her stance and notices Steve's expression as he tracks the girl's progress to her gate. "Try not to think too much," she says. "We have a long flight ahead of us."


	6. Chapter 6

The moment they touch down in Abuja, Natasha digs out a thin card. It vaguely resembles a phone, but it's not one of her burners. Those are the cheap, disposable flip phones she buys by the dozen at convenience stores. This is a distinct blend of elegance and utility that is instantly recognizable if one knows what to look for. 

"You keep Wakandan tech on you?"

"My contact gave it to me. They prefer their own hardware because its designed to be impenetrable and untraceable." She types out a message and sends it off before flicking a slim blade from the cuff of her jacket. Slides it along a seam in the phone. A panel pops open, and she cuts a scour into the delicate inner workings. "A dead informant's phone just sent a message to its primary contact before disappearing from the network. Our ride will be here in eight minutes."

"If they receive a suspicious message like that, won't they know to stay away?"

"If this was any other country's operative, sure. But this is Wakanda we're dealing with. They have technologies that are decades ahead of the rest of the world, and they're still pretending to be a 'developing' country. If a foreign agent got ahold of this tech anddiscovered its origins or figured out how to replicate it, Wakanda's national security would be jeopardized. They can't afford to take that risk, so they will definitely retrieve this phone."

There's a flicker of movement in Steve's peripheries. "We've got four hostiles on our tail."

"They're not hostile," she says. They both stiffen at the distinct sound of an energy weapon priming.

" _Natasha._ "

"Nakia!" she barks out. The weapons are still aimed at them, but the quality of the air has somehow, shifted. "Can't you see with your own eyes that Galina Alekseyev is alive?"

A barely audible sigh behind them. Steve turns, and there's a woman. She is young, but clearly a skilled warrior. She wears a leather tunic, dyed red and stitched with elaborate patterns. Armor plates her neck, shoulders, and forearms. She grips two large rings honed to a razor edge that glow faintly blue. Steve feels the hairs on his neck rise when he looks at her. Some animal instinct in him whispers that she is something to be feared.

"Galya," the woman says, "I heard that you were dead."

"I'm offended that you have so little faith in me."

Nakia flicks her eyes to Steve, studying him for a bare second before turning her attention back to Natasha. "I understand now why my king was always so eager to talk to you, a mere informant. What shall I call you? Alekseyev? Rosenbach? Lukacs? Soltau?" Her gaze sharpens minutely. "Romanoff?"

"I am Natasha to my friends."

"Are we?" Nakia says. "I have brought you into the most precious sanctuaries of my country, and you have lied to us all."

"Not to your king. Never to him."

"Of course you wouldn't. You would not be so stupid."

Natasha sighs. Her tone if firm when she says, "Last year, your king invited a man to enter your country whenever he wished. He had wrongfully attacked this man out of grief and misplaced vengeance, and so he wished to make amends."

"If this man had wanted you with him, he would have asked you to accompany him to Wakanda."

"Perhaps," Natasha says, "but we must go to him nonetheless."

"You were present but did nothing when the old king died." She turns to Steve. "And it was your negligence that killed eleven of my countrymen. Why would I invite either of you into my home now?"

"Is it really your place to exact petty vengeance when T'Challa has already chosen to forgive?" Natasha retorts.

Nakia's eyes narrow, and she thumbs the beaded bracelet on her wrist. A small holographic window appears before her, and she snaps out a command in Wakandan. Her comrades step out from the shadows, lowering their staves. "Come," Nakia says. "I will bring you into the country, but that is the furthest I will take you."

She leads them to a jet in a hidden hangar behind the airport. As they board, Natasha murmurs to Steve, "She is prideful and quick to anger, but she is fair. Of the Dora Milaje, she is the one who pushes T'Challa to the most reckless acts as well as the most compassionate ones."

The flight is a short one, but Steve can't tell if it's because Wakanda is nearby or if it's because their plane is swift. It is a strange and fascinating construction, modeled after a bird in flight with its spreading wings and sleek silhouette. It gives the sense that Wakanda's technology developed from attempting to replicate nature in new and fantastical ways. It wasn't driven forward by the need to discover ever more creative ways to kill people. Even Nakia's ring blades seem to have its roots in agriculture more than anything else.

Steve himself was a weapon created in wartime. Despite their efforts at being a peace-keeping force, each Avenger was born from conflict and strife. And they carry that with them in everything they do. He can only imagine how they must appear to a people who achieved flight merely because they looked at a bird and admired its wings. 

 

* * *

Another woman waits for them at the landing pad. She is similar in age to Nakia, donning the same armor. It is clear that this woman is the more level-headed of the two. Her features are strong and dignified, and her bare head is tattooed with intricate designs. 

When Nakia strides off the plane, she stops and smiles at the sight of the other woman. When they greet each other, the woman presses her hand into Nakia's cheek, brushing her thumb against her mouth. Natasha had mentioned such a gesture to Steve before. An expression of affection between family. She'd once watched this same moment between T'Challa and T'Chaka. 

"Okoye," Nakia says. 

"You seem troubled, little sister."

"It will pass."

"And your guests are?"

"Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff, formerly known as," her expression twists subtly, "Galina Alekseyev."

"Ah," Okoye says. "That is the source of your disquiet. You feel that Galya has betrayed your trust."

"She is not Galya," Nakia snaps. "She is a spy who used our trust to enter Wakanda as she pleases."

"She informed us of the human traffickers who had gotten a hold of several of our country's children."

"She only told us to gain our confidence."

"And those children are home when they otherwise would not have been."

Nakia snarls and stalks away. Okoye smiles fondly as she watches her walk away. "Forgive Nakia. She is upset because she thinks that T'Challa only views her as a child."

"Will your sister be okay?" Steve asks, and Natasha elbows him sharply.

Okoye's smile widens. "We are not blood sisters. We are both far from home because our tribes are a great distance from the capital. Because we feel their absence, the Dora Milaje have found family amongst ourselves. And so we call each other sister." The bracelet on her wrist chirps faintly, and she shapes her hand into several complicated gestures before looking back up at them. "Come. T'Challa has been expecting your arrival. He will meet with you now."

She guides them into through the streets of Birnin Zana. The pedestrians are all dressed in brightly patterned clothing, and the buildings themselves have been painted with colorful geometric shapes. They talk in a thousand tongues—Wakandan, Yoruba, and Hausa most frequently, but the people switch to Xhosa or Malaysian or Ibo or Hungarian or Mandarin or Kanuri or any other language that strikes their fancy. Above them, more of those odd bird-like jets flit between the skyscrapers. Everyone seems to have the same beaded bracelet as Nakia and Okoye. The crowd is awash with flashing holographic screens and fluidly gesturing hands. 

It's a breathtaking city. The spires of Birnin Zana rise like mountains amidst the jungle, neither fighting against nor submitting to the surrounding trees. It asserts itself like a storm would—powerful, awe-inspiring even, but just as integral a part of nature as anything else. Seeing the comfortable coexistence between Birnin Zana and the jungle, he understands in full why Wakanda never felt the need to forge ties with other countries.

And this first sight of Wakanda brings with it the reminder that Steve was indirectly responsible for the first death of a Wakandan civilian on foreign soil in centuries.

They meet T'Challa in a building at the far outskirts of the city. It is white walls and steel and almost alien in its construction, stark against the lush jungle. T'Challa greets them once they enter, and Steve feels a moment of vertigo the first time he sees him. He is dressed in casual clothing, browns and dark blues.  It strikes Steve how young he is. That odd grace and poise with which all Wakandans seem to conduct themselves makes them seem hundreds of years old. The rest of the world seems painfully youthful by comparison, but in reality, T’Challa is closer in age to Wanda than himself.

"Your highness," Steve says, dipping his head respectfully.

T'Challa inclines his head. "Such titles are meaningless here. In Wakanda, a king is a diplomatic figure at best, and his true authority is conferred by his status as the Black Panther," he says. "I am T'Challa. Please address me as such."

"Thank you."

He turns to Natasha. "You could have come as Ulrike, but you chose to contact Nakia directly instead. Why?"

"Trying to gain an audience with the Wakandan king as a mere art dealer would have been too complicated and time-consuming. And Nakia is a valuable comrade. I did not want to lose contact with her simply because of a defunct alias."

"She is angry."

"And she may come to forgive me in time."

"Forgiveness? It is a difficult thing."

Natasha smiles sympathetically. "Yes, it is."

They look at each other in simple companionable silence. It is striking how close they've grown over the past months. Natasha makes few friends, but she and T'Challa are something of kindred spirits. 

"But you did not come here to exchange pleasantries. Your friend is here, and he has made an—interesting request," T'Challa says. "Where he goes, you follow. I know this." He flicks his hand in rapid succession, pulling up a holographic map of the building. He removes a bead from his bracelet and hands it to Steve. "But he may soon go where you cannot follow."

Steve looks at the little blinking dot on the map and turns to walk away swiftly, pausing at the door to say, "Thank you." T'Challa and Natasha are already deep in conversation, their voices low, their heads tilted together.

 

* * *

It is strangely fitting to find Bucky in the art gallery. Steve has to stop and catch his breath at the sight of it. The floating, shifting masses of bottle caps to create the impression of a rippling, luminescent fabric. Frayed cloth and netting dyed and formed into blooming flowers, the silhouette of a mountain range, cloaked men walking in the night. Faces woven into tapestries, their bodies constructed from a patchwork of colors and patterns. 

There are paintings of dancing men and women in blue, their bodies silhouetted against the sun yellow background. A series of portraits of people in pale clothing, their skin like the night sky, little points of colored light shining on their faces.

Steve passes by them slowly, enthralled by the vitality thrumming through the whole gallery.There is an undercurrent of joy in every piece, even the more somber ones. As if the artists here are rejoicing in the depths of hardship. It's captivating, and Steve understands, suddenly, why the world saw Wakandan art and yearned to keep a spark of that energy for themselves.

But Bucky is not in front of any one of these pieces. Steve finds him in the furthest corner of the room. Where the Wakandan art had each felt like a celebration in some way, this part of the gallery is grimmer and more frenetic. Bucky is next to a painting of a family. The brushstrokes are patchy and nervous, and they are naked—vulnerable. The father stares wide-eyed, almost terrified, at the viewer. His arms seem unnaturally long as he crouches behind his wife. She glances away, distracted or unwilling to meet the viewer's eye. A child curls between her legs, and he, too, is looking at something outside the frame.

Bucky is sitting on the floor with his back to the wall of this painting. He is also wearing that odd beaded bracelet that everyone else in Wakanda seems to have. A lightly accented voice is talking about how the artist began painting this shortly after he returned home from the war. The child was added in later when the artist's wife became pregnant. They died shortly after the painting was completed, and the child was never born.

Steve gazes around this little section of the gallery with its jagged abstract pieces and the raw emotional portraits, and he remembers that this is T'Challa's personal collection. He chose every piece, maybe even arranged their placement in the gallery himself. And this small selection of paintings amidst the joyful Wakandan art—this country did not simply lose a king last year. 

Sometimes it is easy to forget that T'Challa was nothing more than a young man experiencing a personal tragedy with no idea how to deal with his grief. And in the midst of mourning, he is handed a role for which he is far from ready. Steve has memories of being that man all too well. In many ways, he still is that man.

He sits down next to Bucky who glances up at Steve. "It talks to me," he says, rattling the bracelet on his wrist. "Tells me about who painted these. I like it here. It's quiet."

"You never were a fan of art galleries before."

"Never got into one for free before either."

Steve huffs a laugh and carefully bumps his shoulder against Bucky's. He doesn't flinch or draw away, and for a long moment, he lets himself revel in the simple contact. "Well, which one do you like the most?"

Bucky peers around then shrugs. "I don't really know. They're all pretty nice. I guess, well, I know I don't like that one. It's just," Bucky sighs with frustration and gestures vaguely, "it's obvious this guy just dumped a bunch of paint onto the canvas. It's a fraud. Any guy can upend a paint can and then get some schlub to fork over a shit ton of money for it. It's not _art_ , you know?"

Steve looks. It's the large painting covering the wall just across from them. The realization hits him. "I _know_ this painting."

"What?" Bucky stares at him incredulously.

"Well, maybe not this one. But I know the style. I saw it when I went poking around about what happened to the WPA artists a few years back."

"This is one of theirs? They’ve been working off government cash for years. They should _know_ better."

"I get where he's coming from with this painting," Steve says, studying the drip patterns and splashes of paint. "I actually like it—a lot."

"You're kidding."

"Do you know how this was painted?"

"I just _said_ —"

"He used house paint."

"So it's a scam."

"No, ah, it's just—" Steve sighs and scrubs a hand against his face. "No one used house paint in their art. It was oils or watercolors, but house paint was too ordinary. No matter how great the piece, anything painted with it couldn't be art because it's too common, too accessible, too _affordable_."

Bucky turns back to the painting and peers at it. His expression is still sour, but there's a new curious light in his eyes. He always caught on quickly.

"And you couldn't get a painting that looked like this if you didn't use house paint and if you didn't lay it on the floor and flick paint at it. Artist paints are too thick, they don't splatter out like water unless you mix them with something and then they get transparent. This doesn't look like art to you, but that's the _point_. Everyone was stuck with oil paints and brushes, but then a guy comes along and uses house paint and sticks, and he makes something that no one else could."

"A ton of these young, optimistic artists in Europe went through the war—the first one, I mean—and it was hell. We were kids then, but it was the first time anyone saw a war as ugly and messy and cruel as that. Anyone would be disillusioned as hell after that. And they began to question everything, and they began to ask themselves why they were putting up with this strict, stifling art culture."

"And they started to challenge what art could _be_ , and they started to make art that was all the things art _wasn't supposed_ to be. And then the next war happened, our war. The fighting got so bad they had to flee, and they came to New York, and met these young guys who were just coming out of the Depression. And maybe they came from different lives, but they _understood_ each other. They were cynical and disillusioned and depressed and traumatized, and the world went to shit on them, but they made something great of it."

Steve stops, breathing hard. Bucky is staring at him, his expression completely inscrutable. Then he sighs and pulls himself to his feet, walking closer to the painting. Steve stares at the line of his back and stands up too. "It may be that," Bucky says, "but it's also just some guy randomly pouring house paint on a canvas. You can have all the history and intent you want, but that won't change what it is."

"It's not—"

Bucky turns back to him and says firmly, "Steve, I've already made my decision. It may have been against my will, I may have been brainwashed, but hundreds of people are _dead_ by my own hand. Whoever I was before, whoever I am now—I will always be a living weapon. I will always be a threat to the people around me. If you don't have it in you to stop me when I need you to, I have to go to someone who will."

"Bucky, please," Steve whispers beseechingly. "We can work something out. We'll figure it out."

"I can't _afford_ to be careless!" he snaps. "It took ten words, and I would have killed you if Zemo ordered it. Even if we root that out, do you really think we can catch everything? Hydra has been using my brain as a playground for the past seventy years. You may think it's okay to be irresponsible with other people's lives, but I don't have that luxury. I don't want another death on my hands. I _can't_ —" Bucky's voice cracks, and his expression crumples into something horrible and wretched. He sucks in a shaky breath. "Not another. Never again."

He edges closer, slowly pulling Bucky towards himself. Steve wraps his arms around his shoulders, and Bucky doesn't return the embrace, but he doesn't pull away either. His body heaves against Steve's, once, twice. "This would be easier if you didn't love me," he says into Steve's shirt, his voice partially muffled.

He closes his eyes, presses his nose into Bucky's hair, breathes in and out and out and out.

 

* * *

Natasha appears beside him. She's always had an uncanny sense for it—coming in the moments when it is the most dangerous for him to be alone with himself. 

"If you needed to," Steve says, "would you kill him?"

She crosses her arms. "To me, he has been the Soldier longer than he has been Barnes."

Steve smiles, small and pained. "He's not the Soldier anymore."

"Just because he's your friend doesn't mean he isn't dangerous. I think you're the only person who hasn't accepted this."

"Natasha, I can't just treat him like a—weapon of mass destruction."

"He's not Wanda," she says, her expression softening. "This isn't some shady organization disappearing him into a secret prison. This is Barnes consciously making the decision to minimize any potential damage he could wreak."

"They're going to _cryofreeze_ him." 

"This is his _choice_. You of all people know how important it is to respect it." Steve sighs. Natasha grips his shoulder, grounding him with the physical contact. "Come on," she says guiding him out of the gallery. 

She leads him down long, pale corridors, and it takes a while for him to realize that they are not heading to the guest quarters. He doesn't know where they are until they stop at what looks like a storage room. The room is cool and dim. The humidity has been carefully moderated. 

"You asked me to bring his paintings," Natasha murmurs. "So here we are."

Scenes and faces from a different life in soft, warm colors. His family most prominently. Bucky's mother is lovely and care-worn, her hands strong and callused, her hair pulled back. Seeing her face over and over again, and Becca's mischievous figure running across several paintings, he realizes that it really was strange that he'd never seen them in a painting before this. And then there are the nightmarish scenes. The bodies twisted in pain, the red bright against the drab blues and browns. They make everything Steve has seen so far seem pleasant by comparison. He has to turn away from those, feeling faintly ill.

It strikes him that though he understood, abstractly, that he was only seeing a small portion of Bucky's paintings. But not to this extent. He hadn't realized that he had never seen the most honest and vulnerable of the paintings. They'd all been hidden from him.

"I didn't know," he says hoarsely. "He never showed me."

Her gaze is sympathetic but firm when he meets her eye. He looks away. Another face stares back at him.

Steve walks to it and reaches out, stopping just short of the surface of a painting. "A self-portrait," he says. It's not at all like how he painted himself in the enormous mural hidden back at the safe house. This painting is who he is now. He wears a sleeveless shirt to reveal the remnants of his metal arm. The edges are jagged and reflect light. His hair hangs limply around his face. He is in the midst of painting, his right arm raised, a brush in his hand. He is painted in dark olive tones with the occasional stroke of brighter red or yellow. 

His eyes are cast in deep shadow, making them seem completely black. His lashes are pale against the darkness of his face, and there's a glint of light in his eyes. He painted himself as this grim uneasy thing. Bucky has never painted himself in the pleasant creams and bright colors as he has his memories of Brooklyn. He is dark green and blue and flashes of steel and sickly yellow and startling pops of red. He paints himself the same as the eerie paintings of Hydra. 

An image appears in Steve's mind. Bucky alone and awake amidst the creaks and sighs of the old house. There is only the light of the moon streaming in through the windows to light his canvas, and he stares into a mirror and paints the hungry creature looking back at him. And Steve has been so, so blind. It wasn't that Bucky slept any better than him—he was just better at pretending. 

"He was _afraid_ ," he says. "I thought—I'd always admired how brave he was. For just getting up and moving forward. But he was terrified out of his mind the whole time. And I didn't even see—"

"No matter how much both of you wish it, Barnes can never go back to living carelessly. Because of Hydra, he's less like you and more like—Banner. He will always have to be careful."

"He's not some _monster_. He's Bucky. He's a good man, and he—" Steve trails off. He has no idea what to say. He just let this sit and fester and maybe he could've _done_ something. Bucky has been quietly unraveling, and he didn't even notice.

"Get out of your head," Natasha says. "This isn't about you."

"He—"

"This is a decision he's been thinking about for a long time. T'Challa made this offer a while ago. And it's not forever. Just until we figure out a way to neutralize him if he does get out of control."

Steve sighs. "I know. I wish—I could be what he needs me to be."

"This was never about you. This is about Barnes. It's his decision and his alone."

Steve turns away from her and presses his head into the cool wall next to the painting. "I'm not going to stop him, Natasha. Just, _please—_ let me be selfish and wish that I could've done something to make him feel safe."

* * *

 

Steve silently lets himself into the medical wing. None of the doctors or assistants seem to be present which is understandable, really. It's the early hours of the morning, and the lights have been reduced to a soft orange glow. The various holographic displays pulse steadily and occasionally one trills like a bird.

Bucky is in the center of the room. The cryotube thrums gently. It is almost a living being in itself, he thinks. The ice on the glass is ever-shifting, always reforming into new crystal formations. Shuri had explained to him once that the temperature is constantly adjusting itself, mimicking a living body's fluctuations. It's a gentler stasis than that of Hydra's. Rather than being forcefully resuscitated every time by jolting a stopped heart, Bucky will wake slowly. As if from sleep. 

"Their research notes—I've read them. It is an ugly thing. Like surgery with a kitchen knife and no anesthetic," Shuri had said, wrinkling her nose. "We are better. We treat the body like it is something to be respected."

Steve peers through the frosty glass. Bucky's expression is peaceful. His eyes roll beneath his lids, and it seems as if his dreams are pleasant. In all the times Steve has visited, he has never once seen Bucky caught in a nightmare. There is some small comfort from that.

"Hey Buck," he whispers. "It's me." Steve presses his hand against the cryotube. A couple more inches, and he would be cupping Bucky's face. He stands like that for a few minutes, feeling the steady hum of the machine under his palm. 

Then he turns away and begins to quietly set up his easel. He takes his time unpacking his brushes, his paints, the various solvents and mediums, and finally, his canvas. Steve glances back at Bucky, half-expecting some sort of reaction. But of course, there is nothing. "I thought I'd try something new," he says. "I haven't painted since—well, I haven't painted in a while. Maybe it'll be good for me." 

He stares at the expanse of white in front of him and prods it with the dry bristles of his brush. "I may have forgotten how," and then, quietly, "I miss you."

Steve takes a breath and starts to paint.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all folks! Here's a fun little game for any interested reader. If you like, you can try to figure out which painters Steve's and Bucky's art styles are based on. Steve's art style is based on a prominent American illustrator from the first half of the 20th century. It's probably fairly easy to figure out who that is.The artist I based Bucky's art style on is more difficult to guess. Hard mode for the art history nerd or the google savvy fan ^_^ He's a 20th century Austrian painter who was known for his non-traditional style and raw expressionistic portraits. 
> 
> There are also a bunch of works by artists referred to specifically in this chapter. They are an Austrian painter, an American painter, and a handful of Nigerian contemporary artists.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Please check out [my tumblr](http://jinlinli.tumblr.com/) and [Riakomai's tumblr](http://riakomai.tumblr.com/) if you would like to chat!


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